system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What exactly do you see when you open a .exe in notepad?
gpt
You are seeing a text editor's interpretation of pure binary code (as well as some actual text).

An exe contains binary numbers representing machine instructions, as well as data, both numeric and text. When the operating system executes an exe, it loads it into memory, then goes to a certain place in the file that is treated as the first machine instruction, and begins execution from there.