> cp/m-86 targets 8086, which is no more useful or relevant to 386 protected mode than the original z80 version. Did you think they just picked the 68k version at random?

The big reason for picking the 68K version is it was mainly written in C (initially in Pascal, but they later switched to C.) By contrast, the more famous 8080 versions were largely written in assembly, as was the 8086 version.

Well, CP/M-80 1.x was mostly written in PL/M, a dialect of PL/I developed by Gary Kildall, but CP/M-80 2.x+ was rewritten in assembly for speed; PL/M was still used for some of the utilities. Obviously, C compilers are much easier to come by nowadays than PL/M compilers are.