I was just reading this interview with John Sculley when I came across this: according to Sculley, Apple pretty much gave birth to the ARM processor, which you’re familiar with if you’ve ever used a modern cell phone. The ARM, in turn, saved Apple from an early death:

Most people don’t realize in order to build Newton, we had to build a new generation microprocessor. We joined together with Olivetti and a man named Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university. And Herman designed the ARM processor, and Apple and Olivetti funded it. Apple and Olivetti owned 47 percent of the company and Herman owned the rest. It was designed around Newton, around a world where small miniaturized devices with lots of graphics, intensive subroutines and all of that sort of stuff… when Apple got into desperate financial situation, it sold its interest in ARM for $800 million. If it had kept it, the company went on to become an $8 or $10 billion company. It’s worth a lot more today. That’s what gave Apple the cash to stay alive.

So while Newton failed as a product, and probably burnt through $100 million, it more than made it up with the ARM processor… It’s in all the products today, including Apple’s products like the iPod and iPhone. It’s the Intel of its day.

The whole interview, from October 2010, is worth reading. Sculley is smart, and a bit repentant. I’d always seen him as a kind of ‘Apple nemesis,’ but this piece has turned me around. Seems more like a good guy put into the wrong situation.

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