Why aren't EXE's in binary?

Question

Why is it that if you open up an EXE in a hex editor, you will see all sorts of things. If computers only understand binary then shouldn\'t there only be 2 possible symbols

Answer 1

Computers don't only understand binary, that's a misconception. At the very lowest, lowest, lowest level, yes, data in digital computers is a series of 1s and 0s. But computer CPUs group those bits together into bytes, words, dwords, qwords, etc. The basic unit dealt with by a modern CPU is a dword or a qword, not a bit. That's why they're called 32-bit or 64-bit processors. If you want to get them to work with a single bit, you pretty much end up including 31 or 63 extraneous bits with it. (It gets a bit blurry when you start dealing with flag registers.)

Digital computers really came into their own as of 8-bit processors, so hexadecimal became a very useful display format as it succinctly represents a byte (8 bits) in two characters. You're using a hex editor, so it's showing you hex, and because of this early byte-orientation, it's showing you two characters for every 8 bits. It's mostly a display thing, though; there's little reason it couldn't show you one character for every 4 bits or four characters for every 16 bits, although file systems generally work on byte granularity for actual data (and much, much larger chunks for storage allocation granularity -- almost always 4k or more).