Every file has a so-called header with some basic file format data and then the so-called raster data which is the raw data itself. (i.e. bmps have several bytes that describe color bit depth, width and height of the image, etc.) This usually doesn't apply to normal text files (except if they are encoded in UTF8 or Unicode, then they do have a small header). It's likely that this file is internally compressed so you can't see the actual contents without using a decoder (in this case Wordpad or MS Word).