How Do You Get the Arrow Keys to Not Enter Text when in vi?

Problem scenario
When you enter text in vi you see A, B, C, or D, when you press an arrow key. How do you get vi to act more "normally"?

Solution
Create ~/.vimrc if it doesn't exist. If it does exist, append a stanza "set nocompatible" (without quotes) to the file.

Here are the steps:

vi ~/.vimrc
set nocompatible