What is PBM?
PBM is Netpbm's bilevel format - one bit per pixel, pure black or pure white, nothing in between. It is used for scanned documents, fax-era imagery and dithered art, and its packing convention surprises people: a 1 bit means black.
What is BMP?
BMP is the Windows bitmap: pixel values written out with essentially no compression, which makes the files enormous and the format trivial to read. It survives in Windows tooling, embedded systems and anywhere a program wants image data without a decoder in front of it. Rows are stored bottom-up.