[jawilson]

Modern machines are optimized to run C which is in fact essentially "stack based" but registers "cache" parts of the stack (often never touching the stack in leaf procedures).

There were at least two well known machines that tried to mix the stack and registers - Sparc and my personal favorite, the am29000.

Intel was so dominant in manufacturing for so long that the objectively kind of crappy x86 ISA just didn't matter for price/performance (and of course was a plus for running legacy software).