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/

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y-curious 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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...

	▲	Keyframe 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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marketing tactics with G4 since it was "so powerful" it was under restricted export control, where in reality it was an outdated regulation that needed an update.

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jmkni 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ironically the US millitary actually did this with the Playstation 3

	▲	crabmusket 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

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bongodongobob 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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duskwuff an hour ago | parent [-]

You may be mixing up the PS2 and PS3. The PS3 found some marginal use in computing clusters; the PS2 did not.

	▲	bongodongobob 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.