Comment Re:8085 versus 6502 (Score 2) 86
"Inspired' only in the sense that she thought the 6502 was underpowered, and she needed something faster. I don't think that counts as making the ARM a descendant of the 6502.
There was more to it than that - see the interrupt handling and memory access were inspired by 6502 and a visit to the 6502 developers convinced Acorn that it was feasible to develop their own CPU.
Also, although the 6502 may not technically be a RISC chip according to the tick-list taught in CS, the 6502 vs. Z80/8080/x86 holy wars of the time had a lot of parallels with the RISC vs. CISC debate*: the 6502 was a simple design, with a small instruction set and no microcode vs. the more complex Z80/x86 with their more "programmer-friendly" instruction sets.
* Which, of course, RISC won - considering that mobile/embedded use has made ARM the most widely-used architecture and even x86 has switched to a RISC-core + instruction decoder architecture.