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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)

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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.

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