Interesting to know, thanks. My intention with that comment was in pondering about vms distributed commercially in the home market, which I don't think I made clear enough in the post. :/
What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.
Blank and Berez were definitely thinking about p-machines when they designed the Z machine, and there is a hat tip in the 1980 Creative Computing article describing its inner workings.
And the founders were AFAIK mostly looking at games as a testbed for bigger and better things—a mindset that unfortunately led to the Cornerstone database.
There were a bunch of minicomputer and the Unix operating systems that would arguable have been better than Microsoft’s entries. But it just wasn’t in the DNA of those companies to sell a consumer-priced operating systems.
