I agree that the lack of information and agency helps the player bond with the PC. Don't forget, though, the effect of Breen delivering his propaganda speech, and the little vignettes like the woman waiting for her husband, or the guy babbling in the train station. Those are atoms of narrative that do advance the story, chiefly by setting the scene, thereby providing a context for the action that follows.

Breen's narrative doesn't so much tell the story as give us a story to work against, but it does play an important part in establishing the ethos of the world your'e about to explore.

Regarding older text games:

Huh? Will Crowther's original Adventure (c. 1975) included dwarves that wandered through the maze and initiated combat. Don Woods expanded Adventure and released it (1977) in a form that included a pirate whose behavior was a little more complex. The thief of Dungeon/Zork (1977) is more complex still. They most definitely interacted with the player and moved through the shared environment, using instructions in the form of code executed by a computer. The command line parser definitely required a computer to work.

You can see the source code for Crowther's original Adventure discussed here:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/011230&from=rss

Early text games were often played on printer terminals, so the "glass teletype" is not really the defining factor here. I remember going through reams and reams of paper in the computer room in the early/mid 80s.