High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Motorola S-record format is an ASCII text encoding for binary data. It is also known as the SREC or S19 format. The format has several advantages over binary formats. The ASCII encoding allows the files to be edited with a text editor. Also, each record contains a checksum to identify data that has been corrupted during transmission. The format was created in the 1970s for the Motorola 6800 processor. It is used by software development tools to encode binary data, especially executable code, for embedded processors.