Comment by erosenbe0

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.