Text is the value that is shown in the Enterprise Manager and in the . It is a column type introduced in Version 7 IIRC. Here is an excerpt from the online books.
ntext, text, and image
Fixed and variable-length data types for storing large non-Unicode
and Unicode character and binary data. Unicode data uses the UNICODE
UCS-2 character set.
ntext
Variable-length Unicode data with a maximum length of
230 - 1 (1,073,741,823) characters. Storage size, in bytes, is two
times the number of characters entered. The SQL-92 synonym for ntext
is national text.
text
Variable-length non-Unicode data in the code page of the server and
with a maximum length of 231-1 (2,147,483,647) characters. When the
server code page uses double-byte characters, the storage is still
2,147,483,647 bytes. Depending on the character string, the storage
size may be less than 2,147,483,647 bytes.
image
Variable-length binary data from 0 through 231-1 (2,147,483,647)
bytes.
