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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

> neutral blue against a deep gray, the "color of television, tuned to a dead channel," to borrow a phrase from Neuromancer

Oh my god. Really?! You have to be kidding me. This phrase means: the color of static - gray and moving with flecks of random color. It has always meant this and always will. It’s inexcusable that a Wired writer doesn’t know this.

Even TVs that show the blue screen still show static for a second before the blue kicks in. I simply don’t believe that anyone really doesn’t know what static looks like, and this blue sky myth is just some kind of in-joke.

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Author of the article here. I never interpreted that opening line as referring to static, but to gray of a blank television screen. Otherwise why not write "the color of television static?"

At the time he was writing, TVs didn't know how to blank out between channels. They just broadcast the noise. Blank television screens (when the TV was on) hadn't been invented yet.

(edit: maybe that's not true, perhaps in 1984 TVs with plain blue between the channels did just about exist? I don't know, in the 80s I only had access to the sort of black-and-white TV that meant his image came across to me exactly the way he apparently intended it)

Hm, maybe but that's not what I had in mind. I was thinking of the way an old Magnavox looks when it's not displaying anything, like when you've just switched it off but it's still glowing slightly. My recollection, which could be incorrect (I was quite young in the early 80s), is that it also looked this way if you switched to a cable channel that didn't exist (I realize in this case it's not technically "tuned" to a channel). Anyway, that deep but luminous gray is what the opening line of Neuromancer has always invoked for me, and what the background of Solarized Dark looks like to me as well.

As another commenter pointed out, Gibson did mean static, so I suppose he must have been thinking of a much lighter gray, I guess illuminated by the Chiba city lights.

If there were such TVs in the 80s they would have been extremely high end models and very uncommon. The “static” interpretation would be far more common, and indeed is what Gibson meant.

Because he is weaving a picture with words. He always meant gray, as described here: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...

The Sprawl is a dreary place; it makes no sense to start the book on a bright and sunshiney day with blue skies.

I wasn't comparing Solarized's blue text to the color of television, I was comparing its gray background to television. In my experience, static is white and black (mostly white), not gray, which is why I thought of a blank television screen rather than static.

I'm not talking about Solarized, I'm talking about the place that the quote in question was describing. "The port" was not a cheery blue sky type of place, it was gray with a restless energy, so the "color of a television tuned to a dead channel" is not a bright blue sky. That's the literary picture he is painting with those words. Good writers don't just state what something looks like, they paint a picture that gives you an overall sense and emotion of it. Investigate the writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk for more on this, or just read some Shakespeare.

In case there is any more question, this is what a "TV tuned to a dead channel" looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ

he probably meant old school CRT, which did indeed had a bluish tint.

"I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful" (https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-...) - so it was intended (even if not necessarily read) as grey static at the time. I always assumed the reference was to the sky being full of debris which reflected light, like a chaotic horizon-spanning disco ball.

No, it did not mean blue or any kind of blue tint. He meant gray. And I can’t say that any CRT I saw had a tint towards any color specifically.

It is kind of a well-known metaphor that if you walked through a neighborhood at night you could see the bluish tint from the TVs of families watching in darkened rooms.

(At least before color television https://lightinganalysts.com/blue-light-hazards-and-televisi...)

...but then the television would be turned to an actual channel, not to a dead one...?

It's about the color of the phosphorus in old black and white tubes. Doesn't matter if it was static or not.

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