File Formats

binary file
a file that contains codes which are not part of the *ASCII character set. A binary file can contain any type of information that can be represented by an 8 bit byte with a possible 256 values.

*ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
a standard code used for representing information on computer systems and networks. It uses the printing and non-printing characters that can be generated by the keyboard. Since 7 bits are available to represent each character it is possible to represent a total of 128 different characters.

Bit-mapped graphics or Paint images
This kind of image is treated as a set of pixels each of which has some colour. Drawing and editing affect the pixels directly. When the image is filed, the information for each pixel is stored. A set of pixels may form a shape such as a circle, but its just a series of dots to the computer. You can erase the dots and draw a new circle, There are actually quite a few types of bit-mapped systems...