Remember that many of the early UNIX variants (SunOS, HP/UX, some others) started out on the 68000 chip. It was a very well designed and flexible chip. Then PowerPC was supposed to be a platform. (Remember CHRP? of course not).
Macs have this image of oddball hardware, but except for NuBus it really wasn't all that true.
Early? You call Unix on a 68000 Early? By cracky, I started out back in 1981 on our shared university system that ran on a DEC PDP-11/70. Boy were we all excited when a few years later we got to run on a VAX!
And fortunately this was in California so the 5 miles I had to walk up hill to get to the computer lab was free of snow.