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What a coincidence, just this morning I was reading a list of best opening sentences in novels, and smiled at this one: "The sky above the port was the color o

What a coincidence, just this morning I was reading a list of best opening sentences in novels, and smiled at this one: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - William Gibson, Neuromancer. But then I thought sadly, that more and more people won't understand that reference as time goes on. I can't remember the last time I saw real channel snow on TV. Probably the last time I owned a tube TV, which is easily a decade or so now... Digital TVs will automatically blank the bad channel out, so the experience of flipping to a blank channel and seeing/hearing snow is something few people will experience nowadays. Like hearing a record scratch, a real bell on a telephone or a fax screeching.

badsectoracula 7y ago
Chances are you may have a different image than what Gibson had since the way a dead channel appears on a CRT had changed over the years and Gibson had mentioned that he was thinking of some very old TVs from his childhood. Here is a relevant thread on scifi stackexchange including a video of a TV from the era Gibson described: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-was-the-sky-above-the-port-in-neuromancer https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-... But in practice i think everyone would understand even without seeing it the first time - it is like phonographs/gramophones, most people nowadays haven't used one in real life but they do know how they look like.
- the_af 7y ago
  I must admit I ctrl-F'ed this thread to see if my question from scifi.stackexchange was here. Thanks for making my day :)
dylan604 7y ago
The static disappeared with the transition to DTV, not the switch away from CRTs. Analog signals can be "fuzzy", digital signals are either received or not.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Digital tv signals can have "blocky" artifacts when the reception is poor. I've see them myself.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    Digital reception will start to store the received signal within a buffer, and the decoder will interpret the signal from within that buffer. With poor reception of a digital signal, the buffer starts/stops being filled. Once the signal is back, it starts filling the buffer again with data missing from when the signal was lost. The blockiness you are seeing is the decoder attempting to decode that incomplete data. The difference between poor analog signal vs poor digital is just totally different. Analog was much more forgiving for receiving less than full signal strength. With digital, the signal stops, starts, stops; there is no partial reception of the signal. Lost packets are not re-transmitted like TCP/IP packets.
Cd00d 7y ago
How do you know Gibson didn't mean a clear blue sky on a perfectly cloudless day? :)
perl4ever 7y ago
I've seen B&W snow but on the other hand, the description seems to apply equally to a bright uniform blue. However, I may have a different perspective because in the 80s and 90s, the "TV" in my house was a computer monitor connected to a VCR with a tuner, connected to a cheap antenna. Any time there was no signal, it was blue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz54Ij1fYNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz54Ij1fYNQ The thing is, it doesn't make sense to me in the way it was apparently intended, because I've never seen a sky that literally looks like B&W static. Today it's snowing where I am, but the sky itself is a uniform blank light gray, as I would expect.
- jandrese 7y ago
  The line is poetic for sure. It evokes not only the cold grey that you'd get if you averaged out the static, but also the emptiness of having no signal. You aren't supposed to read it literally, it is intended to capture the ennui of staring into an empty void in an uncaring world.
jedberg 7y ago
> Digital TVs will automatically blank the bad channel out Some digital TVs will put fake snow up when the signal is lost. I think I've seen my Samsung do it. First it says "No signal" but I think if you leave it long enough it goes to snow.
- tzs 7y ago
  The snow was one thing that was better about analog TV. A very weak signal would show up as snow with some hints of picture. You could reposition your antenna and see if you were making progress or not. With digital, at least on my Samsung, you don't get anything unless you have a fairly decent signal. This makes positioning an antenna a lot harder. In theory, this can be addressed by going to the signal information screen in the diagnostics. But on my Samsung it will only show signal information for channels that it has found via its "scan for channels" function. If you tell it to tune to a channel by number, it will do so even if that channel has never been found via a scan, but then the signal information option is greyed out on the menu. You can change channels while on the signal information screen, but only via the channel up/down buttons on the remote, and they only step through the scanned channels. How did it not occur to Samsung that customers might want to see the signal strength for a channel that was manually tuned to? Further increasing my annoyance with Samsung, I have a Samsung monitor (SyncMaster T240) as my second monitor on my iMac, in the same room as the TV. If the Samsung monitor is on, I cannot get upper VHF or lower UHF channels on the TV. That's because the Samsung monitor spews a lot of strong radio interference in the low to mid 200 MHz range and in the 400-500 MHz range. On an SDR spectrum analyzer this takes the form of a bunch of narrow tall spikes evenly spread across the band, close enough together than dozens of them stomp on any TV channel in those frequency ranges.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Theoretically this is why TV manufacturers include dB meters in most all TVs now. My experience however is that those meters are not very useful because they jump around like crazy and it's hard to get a sense of just how strong the signal is. It also seems to me that while it was pretty easy to tolerate some fuzz on an old analog station, digital artifacts and stalls pretty much ruin a show. We lost some old marginal stations with the "upgrade" to digital TV. Digital is perfect when the signal is good, but degrades much worse than analog.
dwighttk 7y ago
my old digital tv still has an analog coax input that displays snow with very loud static when I'm trying to switch inputs and don't get past it quick enough. This is exacerbated by the fact that it has no remote (possibly lost?) and only capacitive buttons on the front with nothing like a bump or a light to identify where the buttons are. I hate that thing.
variaga 7y ago
It was only 12 years later when Neil Gaiman wrote: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -"Neverwhere" (1996)
rags2riches 7y ago
When the topic came up, I showed my kids the black and white snow (or "war of the ants" as the local term would be translated) and a test pattern. On YouTube, of course. The idea of "there is nothing on" is really foreign.

badsectoracula 7y ago

Chances are you may have a different image than what Gibson had since the way a dead channel appears on a CRT had changed over the years and Gibson had mentioned that he was thinking of some very old TVs from his childhood. Here is a relevant thread on scifi stackexchange including a video of a TV from the era Gibson described: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-was-the-sky-above-the-port-in-neuromancer https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163304/what-color-... But in practice i think everyone would understand even without seeing it the first time - it is like phonographs/gramophones, most people nowadays haven't used one in real life but they do know how they look like.

the_af 7y ago
I must admit I ctrl-F'ed this thread to see if my question from scifi.stackexchange was here. Thanks for making my day :)

dylan604 7y ago

The static disappeared with the transition to DTV, not the switch away from CRTs. Analog signals can be "fuzzy", digital signals are either received or not.

im3w1l 7y ago
Digital tv signals can have "blocky" artifacts when the reception is poor. I've see them myself.
- dylan604 7y ago
  Digital reception will start to store the received signal within a buffer, and the decoder will interpret the signal from within that buffer. With poor reception of a digital signal, the buffer starts/stops being filled. Once the signal is back, it starts filling the buffer again with data missing from when the signal was lost. The blockiness you are seeing is the decoder attempting to decode that incomplete data. The difference between poor analog signal vs poor digital is just totally different. Analog was much more forgiving for receiving less than full signal strength. With digital, the signal stops, starts, stops; there is no partial reception of the signal. Lost packets are not re-transmitted like TCP/IP packets.

Cd00d 7y ago

How do you know Gibson didn't mean a clear blue sky on a perfectly cloudless day? :)

perl4ever 7y ago

I've seen B&W snow but on the other hand, the description seems to apply equally to a bright uniform blue. However, I may have a different perspective because in the 80s and 90s, the "TV" in my house was a computer monitor connected to a VCR with a tuner, connected to a cheap antenna. Any time there was no signal, it was blue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz54Ij1fYNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz54Ij1fYNQ The thing is, it doesn't make sense to me in the way it was apparently intended, because I've never seen a sky that literally looks like B&W static. Today it's snowing where I am, but the sky itself is a uniform blank light gray, as I would expect.

jandrese 7y ago
The line is poetic for sure. It evokes not only the cold grey that you'd get if you averaged out the static, but also the emptiness of having no signal. You aren't supposed to read it literally, it is intended to capture the ennui of staring into an empty void in an uncaring world.

jedberg 7y ago

> Digital TVs will automatically blank the bad channel out Some digital TVs will put fake snow up when the signal is lost. I think I've seen my Samsung do it. First it says "No signal" but I think if you leave it long enough it goes to snow.

tzs 7y ago
The snow was one thing that was better about analog TV. A very weak signal would show up as snow with some hints of picture. You could reposition your antenna and see if you were making progress or not. With digital, at least on my Samsung, you don't get anything unless you have a fairly decent signal. This makes positioning an antenna a lot harder. In theory, this can be addressed by going to the signal information screen in the diagnostics. But on my Samsung it will only show signal information for channels that it has found via its "scan for channels" function. If you tell it to tune to a channel by number, it will do so even if that channel has never been found via a scan, but then the signal information option is greyed out on the menu. You can change channels while on the signal information screen, but only via the channel up/down buttons on the remote, and they only step through the scanned channels. How did it not occur to Samsung that customers might want to see the signal strength for a channel that was manually tuned to? Further increasing my annoyance with Samsung, I have a Samsung monitor (SyncMaster T240) as my second monitor on my iMac, in the same room as the TV. If the Samsung monitor is on, I cannot get upper VHF or lower UHF channels on the TV. That's because the Samsung monitor spews a lot of strong radio interference in the low to mid 200 MHz range and in the 400-500 MHz range. On an SDR spectrum analyzer this takes the form of a bunch of narrow tall spikes evenly spread across the band, close enough together than dozens of them stomp on any TV channel in those frequency ranges.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Theoretically this is why TV manufacturers include dB meters in most all TVs now. My experience however is that those meters are not very useful because they jump around like crazy and it's hard to get a sense of just how strong the signal is. It also seems to me that while it was pretty easy to tolerate some fuzz on an old analog station, digital artifacts and stalls pretty much ruin a show. We lost some old marginal stations with the "upgrade" to digital TV. Digital is perfect when the signal is good, but degrades much worse than analog.

dwighttk 7y ago

my old digital tv still has an analog coax input that displays snow with very loud static when I'm trying to switch inputs and don't get past it quick enough. This is exacerbated by the fact that it has no remote (possibly lost?) and only capacitive buttons on the front with nothing like a bump or a light to identify where the buttons are. I hate that thing.

variaga 7y ago

It was only 12 years later when Neil Gaiman wrote: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -"Neverwhere" (1996)

rags2riches 7y ago

When the topic came up, I showed my kids the black and white snow (or "war of the ants" as the local term would be translated) and a test pattern. On YouTube, of course. The idea of "there is nothing on" is really foreign.