Intel vs. NEC: The Case of the V20's Microcode

I also mis-remembered the CPU. It's a V30, apparently.

I carried mine in high school for note taking. It was a very nice little machine, albeit quirky. With no built-in mass storage aside from the "silicon disk" (2MB SRAM-based battery-backed SSD) using it was an exercise in using lightweight software.

That is... an accurate description of this string, yes. That is to say, it translates each English word with what could be a good translation in some context (except for one misspelling). The resulting sentence, though, is completely incoherent and impossible to understand if you can’t back-translate to English.

(The alleged translation here was obviously done by some who didn’t know the language. As a side note, however, it’s also a fairly hard phrase to translate: slogans often are, because you don’t have as much surrounding text to reshape around any syntactical awkwardness; but this one specifically as well, because Russian lacks a good counterpart of the phrase “care enough to”, unless you can round it off to “need to”.

And what do you know, I just checked both Google Translate and DeepL, and they both produce passable Russian meaning the wrong thing. ChatGPT 3.5 produces a plausible if imprecise try, then a marginally ungrammatical one once asked for more precision, and gives its usual slippery vacillations when asked if the translation is precise.)

> Apparently this quotation was gleaned from a sign on a purloined VAX 780 used by the Soviet military

So I doubt this part, unless the authors only had an English translation of the Russian original at them.