VMS vs. UNIX file system

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <3954 at enea.se> sommar at enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>In practice this mean writing an LF in the middle of a text line is
>impossible in Unix, while is quite OK in VMS.

On the other hand, what is a "text line" that occupies portions of
multiple lines on a display device?  Change "text line" to "text
record" and the concept makes more sense, but then why is text
necessarily organized into records, and why do these records look
like they do instead of something like

x T aps
x res 723 1 1
x init
x font 1 R
x font 2 I
x font 3 B
x font 4 H
x font 5 CW
x font 6 S
x font 7 S1
x font 8 GR
V0
p1
s10
f1
H696
V480
h2075c-
35 33152 33-n120 0
H696
V960
cT
67h54i28sw71i28sw71a50nw86e45x50a50m82p52l28e45.n120 0
x trailer
V7953
x stop