Comment by ndiddy
15 hours ago
Reminds me of how when the Playstation 2 came out, Sony started planting articles about how it was so powerful that the Iraqi government was buying thousands of them to turn into a supercomputer (including unnamed military officials bringing up Sony marketing points). https://www.wnd.com/2000/12/7640/
Is there any compelling evidence that this was marketing done by Sony? Yes, the sniff test does not pass for me about the government officials advertising the device, but this Reddit thread[1] makes the whole story seem plausible. America and Japan really did impose restrictions on shipping to Iraq and people did eventually chain PS3s together for cheap computing.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3hp2i/did_s...
Apple used similar marketing tactics with G4 since it was "so powerful" it was under restricted export control, where in reality it was an outdated regulation that needed an update.
I remember when Sony doing video game related presentations couldn't help but have some marketing about how soon the Playstation 2 processor would be everywhere, your TV, your refrigerator.
At the time I was thinking "Why would my fridge need a pricey expensive processor?"
Many years later I still don't need that.
Ironically the US millitary actually did this with the Playstation 3
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
But it was that good for the price point. And you could run Linux on it. That was the Beowulf cluster era. Lots of universities were doing that.
You may be mixing up the PS2 and PS3. The PS3 found some marginal use in computing clusters; the PS2 did not.
A quick google will show you that it was. I remember because I was in college at the time and that's how I learned what a Beowulf cluster was. Maybe PS3 was more successful or more popular, but there were definitely PS2 clusters.