[jharger]

It's similar, yeah, but actually it wasn't binary or text mode, it was IMAGE, ASCII and EBCDIC modes. Image was essentially binary, but the other two would translate text encodings so that you could convert documents to a format that was readable on other machines.

[lloeki]

IIRC some FTP (client-side? server-side?) implementations even "helpfully" did the DOS to Unix line ending conversion and back when ASCII was used and it involved a Windows machine.