@amszmidt @ramin_hal9001 @bshankar @amoroso @screwtape @sacha I started at university in 1986 and we certainly had graphical workstations on desks (in the beginning mostly Sun and PERQ, later also SGI and HP).
I am confident that Emacs was in widespread use in the offices, though I do not remember anybody complaining about disk noise (swapping or otherwise).