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Did the move from line oriented input to character input also occur around then?

I remember as a student, vi was installed and we all went from using ed to vi.

There was much gnashing and wailing from the admins of the VAX.

1984 would have been largely character if desired -- you already had desktop PCs with joystick and mouse too. The problem was the original party-line ethernet with large numbers of telnet clients or some other [nonstop, nonburst] byte-oriented protocol or serial hardware concentrator, which was a universal situation at educational institutions of the mid-to-late eighties. The Berkeley hack referred to above likely boosted the number of clients you could run on one ethernet sub with acceptable responsiveness.

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