Just an update on the height of my reading stack:

Schismatrix Plus
AS/400 Concepts and Facilities
Neuromancer
Rexx in the TSO Environment

After finishing Schismatrix, I went on to Harry Harrison's
'Deathworld', followed by Ray Bradbury's 'Martian Chronicles'. It's
been a long time since I read any Harry Harrison, my last brush with
him being 'Soylent Green' on DVD, and then before that, the Stainless
Steel Rat series back when I was still at school. When I'm in the
mood, I really enjoy his stuff, but the 100mph pace of his writing can
be a bit much sometimes. Always entertaining though.

The Martian Chronicles I initially found a little bizarre. An
absorbing read, and some great moments, it grew on me page by
page. It was my first written Bradbury, my only previous encounter
(that I know of) being the Moby Dick film (Hi sloum!). I've no doubt
however, that he probably had a hand in a bunch of stuff I've enjoyed
over the years.

Anyway, I found both of these for a pittance at a local second-hand
bookshop and took them home with me. Great value for money.

My short break over, I think it's time I polished off the rest of the
Schismatrix stories. So that's back in the pile. Perhaps trying to
re-live my youth, I've picked up Neuromancer again. As with Harry
Harrison, the last time I read this was as a schoolboy, and to be
honest I probably didn't understand too much of it at the time. This
second read through seems to be making sense so far, but it's early
days yet :)

The other two are part of my continuing involvement with unfashionable
computing platforms. Last month on Mastodon I had a kind invitation to
a free AS/400 account on a system being rescued from the recycler.
Currently waiting with baited breath for a heads-up from the owner
when he gets TCP/IP set up on there, then I'm away. For the time
being, a little bit of learning what it's all about first.

The other is an addition to my burgeoning (and very cheaply assembled)
mainframe library. 'TSO' in this case is the 'Time Sharing Option'
which has long been part of MVS-family OSes, but was originally only
introduced as an optional feature - IBM seeing batch processing as the
main use for their machines and, true to form, TSO can also run in
batch. Kind of similar to the way you can schedule shell scripts in
cron.

(As an aside, I'm also waiting for a promised account to materialize
on a brand-spanking-new z14 running the latest z/OS 2.3. No word yet,
but I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for that)

That's it. I have a *pile* of as-yet untouched books on my shelves,
but they'll just have to wait their turn.