Except that text file end-of-line has never been universal. Old DEC operating systems like RT-11, RSX-11, and RSTS/E used CR/LF as end-of-line, and that was in turn adopted by CP/M, then MS-DOS, and finally Windows. Unix, as mentioned before, has always used LF only, while Apple has always used CR only (even on the old Apple II systems).
And then, of course, we're completely ignoring the issue of character sets (like EBCDIC on IBM mainframes vs. ASCII elsewhere, not to mention the rise of ISO-8859 and now Unicode).