> at major universities and research centres

So not common outside of ivory towers, no?

That was a huge fraction of computing at the time. Before 1992 or so, the only people I was aware of that was into computers were all associated with a University. Typewriters were still actually very common.

Before IBM PC computer's weren't particularly commonplace outside of ivory towers either.

I went to a regional state university. We had an older IBM mainframe with a hypervisor and the students and faculty were all users on MUSIC/OS. This was in the early/mid 1990s.