The original ARM ISA felt very VAX-inspired to me, such as the elegant (but ultimately inefficient) use of a general-purpose register for the program counter.

The original ARM ISA felt very VAX-inspired to me, such as the elegant (but ultimately inefficient) use of a general-purpose register for the program counter. I've only just started looking at AArch64 but I agree that it feels a lot more like MIPS though. I think that's a good thing.