First of all, a "file" on a computer can be thought of as a bucket that you throw characters into. Without the "buckets" to hold what you type on a computer, everything would become a mess. If you've ever saved a document or other work you've done on a computer, you've created a file. What you typed in the document was placed into the file.
Files consist of "characters". All computers draw from a "pool" of 256 valid characters. 128 of those characters are officially approved by the American Standard Code (for) Information Interchange, otherwise known as "ASCII" for short. For the most part, computers will use non-ASCII characters for formatting, printer commands, etc. If you have a file that consists of all ASCII characters, you have what is known as an "ASCII text file". ASCII text files will consist of characters that you can type on a computer keyboard. They include lowercase a to z, capital A to Z, the numbers, punctuation, enter key, etc.
ASCII text files will contain only those characters that are typed on a keyboard. There will be no characters defining bolds, underlines, indents, etc. Word processing files, not being a standard ASCII text file use all sorts of character sequences to define bolds, underlines, etc. In fact, in WordPerfect, the character sequence to define a "bold" can often be longer than what you actually type!
Nearly 100% of all programs on the PC that work with text can generate and read an ASCII text file. This includes WordPerfect 5.1, MS Word, databases, spreadsheets, etc. In addition, there are a couple of ASCII text editor programs that come with DOS (the DOS "Edit" program) and Windows (the "Notepad" program).
This is what an ASCII text file looks like to a computer:
This is a sample of a file that I have created.
This is a second paragraph.
This is what the same text typed into WordPerfect 5.1 looks like to the computer:
ÿWPCN " ûÿ 2 " B / V J Z ú Courier lÿÿ ? x x x , 2ôx þ6X @É ¹`7ûX@þþþþþþþÿþÿÿÿþÿÿþÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿHP LaserJet 4L HPLAS4L.PRS 4Ûx " @É Ï ð \ð"[TX@Ð °°XX Ðûÿ 2 < L #| x This is a sample of a file that I have created.""This is a second paragraph.
As you can see, the ASCII text not only looks like what gets printed, it takes far less characters to make. In fact, what the computer displays is exactly what I typed because that's all there is in the file.
Here's how you can see the simplicity of a system based on ASCII text files.
Create your own ASCII file and find out how closely related the file size is to the number of characters in the file.
1. In Windows, open the Notepad program. In Windows 3.1, pull the "File" menu down and select run and then type in "Notepad" and click OK. In Windows 95, click on the "Start" button and click on "Run". Type in "notepad" and click OK.
2. When the notepad program comes up, type the following (minus the quotes): "123".
3. Pull the file menu down and choose "Exit".
4. Go ahead and save the file when asked. Save it with the name "C:\test.txt".
5. Pull up a DOS prompt. In Windows 3.1, you can double click on "DOS Prompt" in the Main program group and in Windows 95, you can click on the Start button, choose"Programs" and then click on "MSDOS Prompt".
6. At the DOS prompt, type in the following command (minus the quotes): "dir C:\test.txt".
7. You should see a line come up telling you how many "bytes" are in the file "test.txt". It should say 3.
8. Go back into the test.txt file by opening the notepad program again and choose the "open" command under the "File" menu and type in "C:\test.txt" for the file name. In the notepad program, type "45" at the end of "123" and exit the program and save.
9. Repeat the instructions for getting a DOS directory listing. It should now say there are 5 bytes (characters) in the file.
In fact, if you were to dump hundreds of text files into a directory and type "dir", the dir command will total up the total number of bytes (characters) in every single text file, giving you a highly accurate and extremely quick way to verify that you are being billed correctly.