From Apple’s Newton…
There’s also at least one tangible thread that connects the Newton to something you likely use every day (and that indeed drives the entire mobile industry): the ARM processor. Looking to maximize battery life, the Newton team went gunning for something that could generate lots of bits MIPS per watt of power. 3 The best bet for that looked to be an ARM chip. Apple owned a third of the company at the time and directed development of the ARM6 processor that went into the Newton. Without the Newton, that technology could have died on the vine.
ARM became the go to processor for mobile devices such as disk drives, portable computers, and much more but did anyone think of cars as mobile devices?
Fast forward two decades. Tesla chose ARM to develop the on board inference computer that runs FSD. A decade later, yesterday, at the shareholder meeting, Elon Musk said the same inference computer would be used in Optimus and forecast that humanoid robots would count in the billions, more than one per human. At 10% market share that would be over a billion Optimuses (Optimi?)
The Captain