The Wikipedia page on the history of the StrongARM [0] makes the following claim:
> According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible. They then became interested in designs dedicated to low-power applications which led them to the ARM family. One of the only major users of the ARM for performance-related products at that time was Apple, whose Newton device was based on the ARM platform. DEC approached Apple wondering if they might be interested in a high-performance ARM, to which the Apple engineers replied "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we'd use it." [1]
Regardless of the degree of DEC's contribution, the ARM phoenix arose out of the flames of the Apple Newton.
Further irony is that Intel acquired StrongARM from DEC as part of a legal settlement, then sold StrongARM/XScale, then created Atom for this market, while in parallel they developed a low-power 386 for the RIM Leapfrog/Blackberry but later concluded that this market was not large enough (forcing Blackberry to switch to ARM with the introduction of their Java based SDK)[2].
> According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible. They then became interested in designs dedicated to low-power applications which led them to the ARM family. One of the only major users of the ARM for performance-related products at that time was Apple, whose Newton device was based on the ARM platform. DEC approached Apple wondering if they might be interested in a high-performance ARM, to which the Apple engineers replied "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we'd use it." [1]
Regardless of the degree of DEC's contribution, the ARM phoenix arose out of the flames of the Apple Newton.
Further irony is that Intel acquired StrongARM from DEC as part of a legal settlement, then sold StrongARM/XScale, then created Atom for this market, while in parallel they developed a low-power 386 for the RIM Leapfrog/Blackberry but later concluded that this market was not large enough (forcing Blackberry to switch to ARM with the introduction of their Java based SDK)[2].
Intel has made some magnificent missteps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
[2] Graham Tubbs "Harvesting the Blackberry" https://books.google.ca/books?id=oSaoNQcFTzMC&lpg=PA25&dq=Pi...