ARM was originally Acorn RISC Machines, a spin-out from British computer firm Acorn, who set it up in conjunction with Apple (who wanted a low-power RISC cpu fo

ARM was originally Acorn RISC Machines, a spin-out from British computer firm Acorn, who set it up in conjunction with Apple (who wanted a low-power RISC cpu for the Newton): Acorn produced the RISC PC as a successor to the BBC Model "B" family of 8-bit 6802-based micros that were popular in the UK, but failed to compete effectively against Amiga and Atari ST or to move up into the workstation market. In the end, Acorn ended up supplying TV set-top boxes and faded out. But ARM exists to this day, and they are the folks who license the ARM instruction set to customers including Apple. SPARC had nothing to do with ARM, but was entirely Sun's own RISC project, and an attempt to find a way off Motorola CPUs (which powered Sun's earlier workstations).