Spooky were certainly doing that sort of thing in the mid 90s, before others jumped on the bandwagon (See what I did there? 😉 )
IIRC, Fisher turned out a longer travel HT at some point as well. Paragon, I think. OK, so only a 100mm fork from memory, but BITD that was a long travel fork! 🙂
Although, it could also be argued that the HT that made the biggest impact on the market was that ridden by JMC. All of a sudden, we all wanted shorter stems and wider bars….