For about 10 years, I have been teaching Inform to students (mostly English majors) in courses that combine writing with media production. I start them off with HTML and CSS (just to get them familiar with the level of accuracy required of any kind of coding). I've also taught Flash, but this fall I will probably drop it to make more room for Scratch.

The point is not to make these English majors into professional programmers, but rather to familiarize them with fundamental processes such as iteration, versioning, scaling, beta-testing. To someone who has never written a computer program, even very simple concepts such as if-then statements and variables can be completely baffling. I notice that students who play old-school text adventure games are at first very unforgiving about the limitations of the parser, but after they've programmed their own short games, and watched their beta-testers come up with reasonable vocabulary words that they expected the programmer to have implemented, students are more ready to appreciate when a text-adventure author has done a good job anticipating the user's actions. This is a lesson that, I hope, translates to their encounters with other interfaces, making them more willing to take beta-testing seriously, in the future, when they might be writing the copy for team that includes programmers.

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.