I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as

I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as a dumb serial terminal dialing in to a newspaper run system. The story would sometimes be typed live from the reporter's notes directly into the shell session of the remote (minicomputer, etc) system on the far end. This mean that even if there was 5-8KB of text it wouldn't be a problem. Then any formatting/line wrapping/typo and other mistakes from the raw submitted story would be fixed by copy editors from their local workstations.