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If you didn't know, this was primarily a tax dodge for the EU. Since it ran Linux, they felt they could classify the PlayStation 2 as a general-purpose computer

If you didn't know, this was primarily a tax dodge for the EU. Since it ran Linux, they felt they could classify the PlayStation 2 as a general-purpose computer, which receives a lower tariff rate than game consoles. PlayStation 3 had OtherOS for the same purpose, until the EU rejected the claim and reclassified it as a game console, and then Sony pulled support for OtherOS (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help).

gumby 3y ago
I can tell you that support for this went all the way up to Ken Kutaragi. I discussed it with him. He was also responsible for the Ethernet port. He had real vision for the platform. It was more than a tax dodge.
- lupire 3y ago
  If the CEO supported it, why didn't it happen? CEOs like tax dodges and plausible deniability.
  - gumby 3y ago
    What do you mean? Sony did release Linux for the PS2
ppseafield 3y ago
For the PlayStation 3, another thing driving Linux's removal was that organizations were buying PS3s to use in data centers. But Sony sold them at a loss (IIRC over $100/unit loss, even being sold at $600 twenty years ago) and intended to make it up on revenue from games sold. They also didn't have nearly enough at launch because they were using a brand new processor (designed with help from IBM) and a brand new Blu-Ray disc format. That slowed down their initial production, and it had to launch in time to compete with the Xbox 360 (Pre-Christmas 2005), which also had a HD-DVD attachment. Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but it won the format war.
- chasil 3y ago
  They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
  - ppseafield 3y ago
    A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity. Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
    - chasil 3y ago
      Sony should have realized that the Cell/Power was needed in great quantity, and insisted upon a second supplier. Motorola started making the PowerPC 601 in 1992, so a secondary foundry was absolutely available. From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York." AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
    - hawflakes 3y ago
      Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level. Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
phire 3y ago
> (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help). The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update. The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find other exploits. If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.
- rgovostes 3y ago
  Thanks for your work reverse engineering PSJailbreak, by the way. (https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSJailbreak_Exploit_Payload_Reverse_Engineering https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSJailbreak_Exploit_Payload_Re...)
  - phire 3y ago
    I also worked on PSGroove. Though that was very much a team effort, I knew nothing about USB before working on that. From memory, my contribution was mostly tweaking the code until it worked, I think my PS3 was the first to be exploited by PSGroove. Though, I wasn't happy at merely copying the sequence of packets USB that lead to an exploit, so I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of how the exploit worked. That document is the result of my efforts.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I recall there was something involving Other OS and soldering a wire into the motherboard.
  - xcrunner529 3y ago
    It was one of the first ways I could rip a bluray, though
chasil 3y ago
I wonder how this performed compared to a DECStation 5000/240 running Ultrix. That was my workstation for a student job. It had a MIPS R3000. DEC probably would have lasted longer if they had bought MIPS instead of sinking all the effort into Alpha (and PRISM before it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation
swatson741 3y ago
This isn't quite correct as I understand the situation. It wasn't classified as a computer in Europe because it could run Linux but, because the bundled demo disc included Yabasic (a basic interpreter) in the European regions.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38
pengaru 3y ago
The linux kit shipped in 2002, the ps2 shipped in 2000. It came with yabasic on a demo disk, that's what qualified it as a computer for the eu tax break. ps2linux was chronologically irrelevant to your claim AIUI...
Wingman4l7 3y ago
Then Sony got sued in a class-action for removing support for OtherOS!
- pjmlp 3y ago
  That was in the Playstation 3, this was for Playstation 2.
lupire 3y ago
I wish I could decide to not pay my taxes, and give a fraudulent excuse, and not go to jail.
pjmlp 3y ago
Completly false, that was shipping Yabasic CD with the Playstation that turned it into a 8 bit like home computer. PS2Linux was the next iteration of Net Yaroze from Playstation 1.

gumby 3y ago

I can tell you that support for this went all the way up to Ken Kutaragi. I discussed it with him. He was also responsible for the Ethernet port. He had real vision for the platform. It was more than a tax dodge.

lupire 3y ago
If the CEO supported it, why didn't it happen? CEOs like tax dodges and plausible deniability.
- gumby 3y ago
  What do you mean? Sony did release Linux for the PS2

ppseafield 3y ago

For the PlayStation 3, another thing driving Linux's removal was that organizations were buying PS3s to use in data centers. But Sony sold them at a loss (IIRC over $100/unit loss, even being sold at $600 twenty years ago) and intended to make it up on revenue from games sold. They also didn't have nearly enough at launch because they were using a brand new processor (designed with help from IBM) and a brand new Blu-Ray disc format. That slowed down their initial production, and it had to launch in time to compete with the Xbox 360 (Pre-Christmas 2005), which also had a HD-DVD attachment. Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but it won the format war.

chasil 3y ago
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
- ppseafield 3y ago
  A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity. Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell processor overall.
  - chasil 3y ago
    Sony should have realized that the Cell/Power was needed in great quantity, and insisted upon a second supplier. Motorola started making the PowerPC 601 in 1992, so a secondary foundry was absolutely available. From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York." AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
  - hawflakes 3y ago
    Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level. Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.

phire 3y ago

> (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help). The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update. The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find other exploits. If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.

rgovostes 3y ago
Thanks for your work reverse engineering PSJailbreak, by the way. (https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSJailbreak_Exploit_Payload_Reverse_Engineering https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSJailbreak_Exploit_Payload_Re...)
- phire 3y ago
  I also worked on PSGroove. Though that was very much a team effort, I knew nothing about USB before working on that. From memory, my contribution was mostly tweaking the code until it worked, I think my PS3 was the first to be exploited by PSGroove. Though, I wasn't happy at merely copying the sequence of packets USB that lead to an exploit, so I spent some time trying to get a better understanding of how the exploit worked. That document is the result of my efforts.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I recall there was something involving Other OS and soldering a wire into the motherboard.
- xcrunner529 3y ago
  It was one of the first ways I could rip a bluray, though

chasil 3y ago

I wonder how this performed compared to a DECStation 5000/240 running Ultrix. That was my workstation for a student job. It had a MIPS R3000. DEC probably would have lasted longer if they had bought MIPS instead of sinking all the effort into Alpha (and PRISM before it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation

swatson741 3y ago

This isn't quite correct as I understand the situation. It wasn't classified as a computer in Europe because it could run Linux but, because the bundled demo disc included Yabasic (a basic interpreter) in the European regions.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38

pengaru 3y ago

The linux kit shipped in 2002, the ps2 shipped in 2000. It came with yabasic on a demo disk, that's what qualified it as a computer for the eu tax break. ps2linux was chronologically irrelevant to your claim AIUI...

Wingman4l7 3y ago

Then Sony got sued in a class-action for removing support for OtherOS!

pjmlp 3y ago
That was in the Playstation 3, this was for Playstation 2.

lupire 3y ago

I wish I could decide to not pay my taxes, and give a fraudulent excuse, and not go to jail.

pjmlp 3y ago

Completly false, that was shipping Yabasic CD with the Playstation that turned it into a 8 bit like home computer. PS2Linux was the next iteration of Net Yaroze from Playstation 1.