It wasn't so much that people didn't use PCs in the mid-80s--though they were by no means universal. But they weren't necessarily useful traveling. Email, especially outside of walled-garden company systems, was relatively uncommon so having a computer on the road wasn't a big win.
I got an MBA in the mid-80s and PCs were absolutely used universally although typically in the computer lab. I had a personal one but I was in the minority. When I went to work afterwards, we exclusively used a minicomputer based system for a number of years.