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Were the PS2s shipped to Iraq for computing or just for soldiers to play during their down time? I feel like the latter is far more likely, especially since we
by nindalf 2y ago
Were the PS2s shipped to Iraq for computing or just for soldiers to play during their down time? I feel like the latter is far more likely, especially since we know that soldiers had access to game consoles for recreation.
I can't imagine what general purpose software they'd have wanted to run on a PlayStation 2 from 2000 that they couldn't run on a general purpose laptop in 2004.
- BostonEnginerd 2y agoDo you mean US soldiers? We didn’t have a presence in Iraq in 2000, the invasion occurred in 2003.
- lomase 2y agoThe PS2 release price was $299 USD. Consoles used to be cheap.
- malfist 2y agoYou're being down voted, but it's the truth. PS2 were sold so much below cost it wasn't uncommon to see hobbiests and institutions building beowulf clusters with them. But these days, consoles aren't sold below cost, and gigabit network isn't fast enough to make cluster computing make sense
- lomase 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29651383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29651383 A 64 bit MIPS processor that can run linux + networking for 299$. I know is not exactly the same but how much was a SGI workstation 20k? 40k? 80k?
- kevindqc 2y agoThat's $450 in 2020 dollars. The PS5 launched at $399 in 2020 (digital version)
- lomase 2y agoThe PS2 was a state of the art machine with similar hardware of a SGI workstation. Those computers started at 20k. While the PS5 has similar hardware as a low end PC. If the PS5 had a Nvidia A100 the comparasion would make sense and people would be buying them to create clusters, like they did with the PS2 and 3.