@toejam
"For all their past mistakes, the 80386 did resolve most issues. Flat memory, 32 bit registers, more orthogonal instruction set"
In other words, the issues that Motorola got more-or-less right in the first place with the 68000. While I've spent almost all my professional life dealing with Intel based systems, I've always thought the way Motorola broke with the 8-bit architecture* when producing a more advanced processor was a better approach.
Certainly, some of your suggestions (e.g. 256 byte aligned segments) would have given a 16MByte address range (comparable with the the 68000) and 80186 instructions would have been nice to have from the start (if I remember correctly, there were some 80186 'almost PC compatibles' around - the 80186 built in peripherals and associated interrupt map didn't quite match those used in a standard PC), but going from the 8080 to pentium class and beyond CPUs seemed more like a fade-in rather than a step-change, with current generations carrying all the baggage of previous ones.
In a sense, keeping all the previous baggage makes people (including me) lazy/stingy (you decide!) - I was still using software originally written for an MSDOS 3.1 8086 machine when I had a 486 machine with Windows98SE.
*admittedly not entirely, as some instructions were designed to allow easy use of their 8-bit IO devices.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
