>
> It's sounding like it really was a Great Innovation in those days  
> to separate the
> model from the view.  In retrospect it's taken for granted as good  
> design.
> The specific print head movement characteristics of a particular  
> piece of display
> hardware have no business polluting the internal representation of  
> a portable
> text file format.
Portable? In those days, networking and portability were not real  
concerns on the minds of anyone.
Back then, people really believed their code would disappear in a few  
years, to be replaced by something else!

All in all, it is should be evident that there are two (3 if you  
count the old non-unix mac os) line ending paradigms to care about.
Not too bad! Consider how many other things are splintered more!

This is not a matter of pointing fingers or saying my OS is better  
than yours,
this is simply a matter of doing what needs to be done.

Even now, a "simple" text file could have any kind of crazy internal  
formatting that is meaningful only to some particular program.
The history is interesting, but hardly important to writing the code  
for now.