As far as I remember when I used VMS while at the high school, if you write a text file in VMS and then read it byte-by-byte as binary, well, there are no line separators at all. Each line is seemingly a record in the file. I don't know more about the details, but the information is not in the byte stream of the file, it's probably some metadata elsewhere in the filesystem. Other OSs don't work that way. An FTP transfer in ASCII mode will insert line breaks where appropriate while downloading from VMS, but other file types relying on records can't be reproduced outside VMS as simply.