Looking back it does appear that Intel did nearly everything right, and their competitors didn't. It did help a lot though getting the IBM PC business, and due to that, aligning with Microsoft. If you look at the 68000 machines at the time they all had flaws that prevented them from really taking off, often not things that couldn't be corrected, but things that held them back. The Mac didn't have a hard disk, or multitasking, or color. The Amiga would always be constrained by the custom chips and that would be a problem long term, plus Commodore wasn't investing enough in software. Atari had a good simple product, and GEM wasn't too bad, but they didn't develop it further either. And the workstation market was constrained, as said by the parent, by the lack of a decent MMU solution. And then RISC came along too. In an alternative universe maybe the 68000 machines could have joined forces around a common unix platform and built a major market, but that didn't happen here.
What held back the 3b1? That's rarely mentioned in these parts, but it was a fantastic machine from a company that had experience building real computers (if even for its own use.)
There were a lot of early UNIX workstation companies in the early 1980s. Three Rivers, Apollo, HP, IBM, Apple, Sun, Sony, and AT&T all had 680x0-based machines. All totally incompatible.
At the time, it looked like lower-cost versions of those were the future of computing. But, as mentioned previously, Motorola was too slow getting the MMU situation fixed, which meant that all those workstations had some homebrew MMU that ran up the cost. Not until the 60030 in 1987 did Motorola offer an on-chip MMU. Workstations in that era cost $10K - $20K in 1980s dollars. Even the Apple Lisa was a $10K machine. Workstation prices didn't come down fast enough. Meanwhile, people were learning how to get things done on the original DOS PC, clones, and PC/AT, which had inferior technology but volume was driving down the price.
We had UNIX on the desktop in the 1980s, but few could afford it.
