Most everyone knows what a Word document is. Everyone knows what an email message is. Everyone knows what a web page is. A lot of people know what an MP3 or WAV file is. Not everyone knows what a text file is.
Guess What: They’re All Files!
Since Apple introduced the Macintosh, the concept of Files and Folders was introduced. It is based on a traditional office metaphor – You have a file cabinet, there are folders in it, and the folders contain files. You can put files and folders on your desktop.
Before that, computers had files, but they were stored in directories. You could also put directories in directories. In this way, you could organize your files by putting them in directories. The Apple metaphor just gave directories a new name.
The Bottom Line: If it’s on a computer , it’s a file.
Here are some files you might be familiar with:
- Word documents
- MP3/WAV files
- Videos
- Web pages
- Email messages
- Spreadsheets
- Text file
- Images
- Programs and apps
This is true on your laptop, your iPad or other tablet, and your phone. You might be interested to know that everything you download from the web is (at some point) a text file. This is because it has to travel from computer to computer on its way to you, and also through routers and such, so everything gets converted to text, the lowest common denominator.
Be aware that many types of files are plain text files, and others are called binary files. Binary files contain some kind of code that is not “human-readable”. Images and videos are good examples. Other kinds of files are text files – web pages, Notepad files, and a number of other files are just plain old text files. You could open them with Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) and many other text editors. An email is actually a text file, but if there are attachments, they are stored in a binary format.
Next up: Memory and You – RAM and Disk Drives Demystified
Good on you, Bob, for helping lift the veil of mystery and translating into plainer language the “computerese” that most people struggle with to some extent. I imagine many “aha!” moments have occurred and will occur among your readers.
As your brother, I hesitate to correct you publicly; but as one technophile to another, and in the interest of rectifying the public record, I feel duty bound to correct two factual errors in this post.
1. “Everything you download from the web is (at some point) a text file.” This seems to say that, during every download, the web server uses something like base64 (see #2) to convert a binary file to text before delivering it across the internet to the browser, and the browser uses base64 to convert the text file back to its original binary form before saving it. That is simply not true. The web server delivers the file in its original binary form, along with a short, text-based informational header that helps the browser decide what to do with it.
2. “If there are attachments, they are stored in a binary format.” Yes, an email is a text file, but its attachments are also stored in text format. When you attach a binary file (such an image or a PDF or a Word document) to an email message, the email program converts it to text format via the standard translation method called “base64”. That string of text characters is the form in which the file is transmitted and stored. When you click an attachment to open it or save it, your email program uses the “base64” translation method to convert it back to its original (binary) form, which can then be opened or saved.
I respect your formidable wisdom, Bob, and if you have reasons for believing I’m wrong about either of these things, I’ll be glad to hear them.
Thanks, Dave. I appreciate the correction. I’ll invoke the words of a colleague: “sufficiently vague as to be accurate.” Pretty much everything that flows through the web has to be in text characters characters to get through all the gateways it has to flow through. I expect experts to correct details such as this. I don’t feel your average user cares about these details. In the same way as K is 1024 and an M is 1024×1024. As I said, I think of a K as 1000, an M as a million, and a G as a billion (or a gazillion as I actually said.) 1024 cubed is pretty much meaningless unless you have an off-by-one bug, at which point the “magic numbers” are relevant. They are usually only relevant to nerds like us…