introducing peekbot

[jonnosan <jonnosan@gmail.com>]

peekbot is an attempt to make vintage computing artifacts visible to
the modern intarweb.It is a web proxy that allows navigation through
online collections of disk images. For disk images in formats which
peekbot understands, the file system contained on that disk image can
be explored.

Many of the common file types found in the file systems can be
converted to a format that can be viewed in a browser.For example,
tokenised BASIC files can be listed as ASCII, or (some) old graphic
formats converted to PNG.There is also a track/sector viewer, and any
file found on a disk image can be viewed as a hex dump.

peekbot is based on ripxplore, a ruby library for identifying and
extracting data from disk images [ripxplore is
a substantial reworking of dsktool - I have attempted to make it much
more modular, to allow plug-ins to be developed for different file
systems and file types. It also now understands C64, Atari and TRS80
disk images and file systems, whereas dsktool was Apple 2 specific]

here's some simple steps to try it out:

0) go to the peekbot home page - http://peekbot.jamtronix.com/
1) click on "Apple 2 image collections mirrored at apple2.org.za" from
the list of disk image archives
2) click on "ftp.apple.asimov.net/" under "Navigation Options"
3) click on "images/" under "Navigation Options"
4) click on "communications/" under "Navigation Options"
5) click on 'explore' to the left of
'hacking_construction_set.dsk.gz' (under 'Peekable Images'), to get a
list of
all files on that disk.