[grond]

You are happily mixing technical facts collected from several decades to make your point. All your reasoning relies on inadmissible hindsight.

Originally Posted by litwr

It sounds contradictory for me. Everybody had been happy with 68k and after a few moments they became unhappy...

They had been happy for a whole decade. Pretty long "few moments" if you ask me.

I can again say about quite popular Apple Macintosh which could successfully compete with IBM PC. Atari and Amiga had their respectable ecosystems. There was a world of 68k based Unix workstations. So your argument rather contrived for me.

The 68k could have easily survived and remained superior to the x86 if the same amount of money and manpower had been invested into its development. It is as easy as that. Intel had loads of money from the huge success of the PC and at the same time there was a huge amount of closed-source software that made their customers reluctant to switch the processor platform.

There are no technical reasons why a 68k ISA could not be as fast or faster than the x86 counterpart. In fact, the 060 was a very good competitor to the Pentium and also faster than the first PowerPC processors. The reason why CISC was abandoned was that no other company than Intel could afford the huge R&D effort it took to make the ugly and nonorthogonal ISA that fast. RISC was introduced to make it more economical to develop a processor. Abandoning 68k in favour of the PowerPC ISA was a management-driven decision. There was less legacy-software intertia than in the x86 campus (Apple, after all, was agreeing to the move to PPC) and processor development was becoming cheaper due to moving to a RISC ISA.

Were there needlessly complex parts in the 68k ISA? Yes, of course. Did that mean that the 68k couldn't have been made to compete with x86 performancewise? Heck, no, of course not.

IMHO it is quite natural to consider that ARM began the era of fast processors

There is no such thing as an "era of fast processors". Selecting ARM as the beginning of such an era is totally arbitrary. And frankly, nobody cared for ARM. It is only in hindsight that ARM seems to have been a relevant ISA because it is relevant TODAY. The ARM ISA is not so different from many ISAs of the time. And it suffers from many things that seem very ugly today like predication or the link register. Because ARM is relevant today, many of the shortcomings of the original ARM ISA have been abandoned in the more recent ARM ISA revisions.

and Motorola couldn't convert its huge ISA for the new technology fast enough. Motorola wanted to share DEC VAX success in the late 70s but it caused the necessity to share its failure too in the beginning of 90s.

And why could Intel "convert its huge and nonorthogonal ISA" fast enough? Only because they had the money and thus the manpower. Why did Intel survive the existence of faster processors to begin with? Because of the infamous "PC compatibility" requirement that has held a large proportion of the processor market hostage for some decades. DEC had the Alpha and the PowerPC 604 was also faster than any Intel processors at the same time.

I can repeat Intel and ARM didn't follow DEC or IBM/370 - they just created better processors.

Better than the preceding generation of processors, not necessarily better than the competition. This was enough because of the compatibility lockdown. As long as another processor ISA couldn't emulate x86 fast enough to outperform them, Intel could just go at their own pace. Interestingly Intel themselves failed prominently in marketing a better ISA than x86. Even they could not overcome the compatibility obstacle because providing a faster processor wasn't enough to gain a market.

On the contrary Motorola and National Semiconductor tried to create a processor with ISA similar to VAX.

Again you are happily jumping from one decade of processor development to another...

BTW computers for Unix also needed something better than 68k so Sun developed its famous SPARC processor for them and became the leader for that market.

Yes, and SPARC was superior to x86 until the advent of the Pentium III. As was just about any RISC processor. Those were happy times because there were more than two competing ISAs. That is a good thing and not suitable as an argument against an arbitrarily chosen one among the available architectures. You could just as well say "Sun needed something better than ARM and thus developed its SPARC processor".

[SUN] didn' use x86 even despite of the presence of a terrible monster "IBM PC".

Do you see the point you are making yourself? The x86 survived because of MONEY, not because of any technical superiority. The x86 wasn't suitable for what SUN needed.

Even AMD cannot keep up with Intel even though they are building the same ISA. It's because of the MONEY that only Intel can put into R&D and their fabrication process which is at least one generation ahead of all the competition.