True, but at the time Microsoft was no slave to x86. They had 8080 (Z80), 6502, 8086 (8088), and 6809 versions of Basic. I am sure if the marketed had demanded it a 68000 version MS-DOS was possible, especially considering CP/M 68K was already a thing.
Yeah, that's the thing, if you look at Multiplan and some of the other office apps MSFT had ported to other systems, they went with a VM before the JVM was even a thing. Not sure if the Pascal P-Code thing was first, though it was around 1977, so it might predate multiplan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan vs
http://pascal.hansotten.com/ucsd-p-system/ and yes, was thinking about a DOS for 68000 natively in the same vein as CP/M68k.
Point is that unlike the Macintosh, the Lisa was designed to support multiple operating systems. ( Yet running MacOS on Lisa seems to get no love.. )
Eh, I mean, I did build out one of my Lisae to be optimized for MacWorks, but yeah, I tend to just launch mini vMac instead or Basilisk II. (And yes, I do have many actual Macs from the 128 all the way to quadras and PPCs.) - but it's rare for me to power on a Mac or for that matter an actual Lisa, though I do love tinkering and repairing these machines.
For many years my Lisa was my Mac, running MacWorks until I built a hackintosh from the IIcx motherboard with a PC power supply and other parts (as in Bob Brandt (sp?) "Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle" book - and then after that I bought an actual 7100 as my main machine. I did have PCs but mostly they were just background machines, used for when I needed to use them rather than preferred. Mostly I used whatever Mac was the newest most cable 99% of the time, or Sun Microsystems hardware (and yes, I did run MAE on my SPARC 5 and later ones too.)
