But you have to remember that:
1) There was no Internet, so no networking outside the house except using a slow modem.
2) There was no networked devices (NAS, media players etc)
3) Not many end users had access to more than 2 computers.

The floppy had a transfer speed of about 50kB/s (in short bursts between the disk changes).
These cables gave floppy speed continuously between two machines.

So in reality, it was networking.
Two computers was the most common size for networks at that time.
Most companies with multiple machines had them stand-alone.
Only few companies had networking and a centralized server.

Another important issue was that in the early years of networking, it was mostly limited to printer and file sharing. There was an extremely limited number of programs that could do networked connections between two applications. Almost all "networked" programs were limited to use file locking to communicate with files.