According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer #IBM wanted to use the #m68k #CPU in the #IBMPC, but couldn't because the #Motorola 68000 wasn't yet ready for production.
That's a pity. If the 68000 was available, #MSDOS would be 32-bit and the #640k barrier would never have existed.
@argv_minus_one What doomed the PC format to be a hacky mess was that it was too easy and lucrative to bypass the BIOS.
If we had had well-behaved software that only used BIOS interrupts, the core BIOS could have been moved from "just under the 1M line" to "just under 16M" on the 286, and then "just under 4G" on the 386.
Add-on cards might have had a hard time though, assuming they mounted ROM or had hard-coded internal addresses below 1MB though.
ARGVMI~1.PIF
Hak Foo 