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Answer:

Yes.


Files and Hardware

As far as the hardware of a computer system is concerned, all files look alike. Each file is regarded by hardware as a collection of bytes. (Remember that a byte is 8 bits.)

The hardware makes no distinction between (say) image files and text files. Its all bytes to the hardware. What those bytes are used for is up to the software.

A hard disk is like a bookshelf with many books on it — novels, picture books, text books, note books... The bookshelf works the same for all books, since all books are fundamentally alike: patterns made from ink put on paper. Of course, different books use ink patterns in different ways but that is a "software" distinction, not a property of the storage hardware.


QUESTION 5:

The program Notepad reads and writes text files but cannot deal with MS Word files. Does this mean that those files are fundamentally different?


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