alt Hacker NewsI was drooling over the MC68000. I had a pre-release reference manual from 1979 and it was the most awesome chip around. Atari and Commodore and Apple used it after their 6502 systems. Arcade games used it after their 6502 and 6809 days. The only reason x86 became popular was because IBM put it in the PC - not for any technical reasons.
A 68k was roughly double the cost of an 8086, plus the additional cost for the rest of the supporting chips.
The PC was intended to be cheap and was competing with 8 bit machines. Being 16/20 bit made it already high end.
If you wanted 24 or 32 bit, IBM had many other machines to sell you. Or you could just buy a VAX.