How the spectrum's cousin is in your pocket today: (shortened version, of course)
The spectrum was produced by Sinclair. Sinclair was a partnership of the eccentric Sir. Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry. During a bit of financial trouble Clive Sinclair and Curry split. They were both working on reducing a computer to the simplest thing possible so everyone could afford one. Eventually Curry's company became Acorn and got the BBC home computer contract. Acorn flourished and eventually migrated to a RISC architecture. When Acorn was split up, Apple and others invested in them to produce ARM and the ARM architecture. This ARM architecture lives on in every iPhone, iPad and probably a majority of android devices. ARM stands for "Acorn Risc Machine"
Apple had nothing to do with ARM until it was well established.
It was designed and built independently and was on the market for years first as a coprocessor add-on for the BBC and as a standalone workstation (Archimedes).
I have my original Archimedes (310) in my loft. It's still the most productive and powerful machine I ever owned.
> every iPhone, iPad and probably a majority of android devices
That's a mild understatement. ARM practically owns the entirety of the mobile device market. Every major mobile OS is near-exclusive ARM based (Android being a very recent exception, and Intel handsets haven't shipped yet) Outside of China (where MIPS seems to have a bit of marketshare); you'd be hard-pressed to open up a reasonably smart non-PC device and /not/ find an ARM chip.
The spectrum was produced by Sinclair. Sinclair was a partnership of the eccentric Sir. Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry. During a bit of financial trouble Clive Sinclair and Curry split. They were both working on reducing a computer to the simplest thing possible so everyone could afford one. Eventually Curry's company became Acorn and got the BBC home computer contract. Acorn flourished and eventually migrated to a RISC architecture. When Acorn was split up, Apple and others invested in them to produce ARM and the ARM architecture. This ARM architecture lives on in every iPhone, iPad and probably a majority of android devices. ARM stands for "Acorn Risc Machine"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers