[hnlmorg]

“Modern” FTP clients would auto detect if you were sending text or binary files and thus disable line conversations for binary.

But go back to the 90s and before, and you’d have to manually select whether you were sending text or binary data. Often these clients defaulted to text and so you’d end up accidentally corrupting files if you weren’t careful.

The pain was definitely real

[kbolino]

And, if you were using a Windows client talking to a Unix server, you didn't want to get a text file in binary mode, since most programs at the time couldn't handle Unix line endings. This is much better nowadays, to the point that it rarely matters on either side of the platform divide which type of line endings you use.