Binary files, text files

What do these terms even mean?

Pragmatically,

• text file = "All data is useful as text"

characters in a sequence that you could edit at will in the simplest types of "characters after another" style editor

human-interpretable, human-editable

• binary file = "not just text". It's a catch-all.

a binary file is one you probably can't edit without severely breaking the present structure

and where it probably wouldn't occur to you, e.g. because the most useful data isn't text to start with.

probably not human-readable, probably not human-editable

Even that needs footnotes, and we haven't even gotten technical yet.

'Binary' seems to come from a time before a lot of different file formats existed, where computer use was computer programming, and where we mostly had code that humans wrote, and code in compiled, machine-readable form.

The compiler output was ofetn called 'the binary', and that is still used. So arguably it's short for 'a binary executable' or some such term.