Okay, show of hands. When you think of the color of television tuned to a dead channel what comes to mind?

Static gray, a constant jumble of black-and-white that's hard to pin down.

That blue screen.

I've always just seen the static gray and associated it with the state of mind you're in when you wake up and the channel you were watching had signed off. Most VCR's and TV's these days just superimpose that blue screen if the signal isn't strong enough. So the color of television, tuned to a dead channel, is bright blue. Anybody see Neuromancer opening with a night sky that's a harsher shade of blue than daylight?

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Originally posted by klik:

Static gray, a constant jumble of black-and-white that's hard to pin down.

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back when I read it, a dead channel = snow. so the Chiba sky was grey in my mind.

but your take on it is pretty interesting. does the sky have a big green number on the corner as well?

deny everything

That's funny, I never thought of it as snow. I thought of it as the color of one of those old TV tubes just after it had been turned off and the bright white dot in the center was just fading away (yes, I remember the kind, though I am not as old as the hills yet). A kind of dull grey but with an internal luminescence (whoa... that can't be the right spelling). I always think of the effect that you get with low clouds in a dense urban area, where the lights from the city make the clouds shine like some sort of huge damp out-of-focus electric billboard.

Ne? Ne!

When I was young, very young, and all we had at home was a B&W TV, with manual channel searching, which was not very important as there were only two channels back then, you could amuse yourself just checking frequencies. And you would get many different types of snow: fine grey, white on black, black on white, striped, coarse, almost pure white...

I always assumed it to be of the fine grey type, myself. I have seen such a sky in winter, early morning, over Duisburg (Germany). The darker smoke broken to fine wisps over a light grey background.

José

it was grey.

video white noise

OR, in details:

fixed number of horizontal lines composed of random grey traces of varying length.

i was born in the era of tubes.

georgy -- { ki~2, parisian photo diary --> http://www.arobi.com/ki~2 }

It's quite wierd to think that, with the increasing uptake of digital TV and Radio, and the feature of most TVs and videos to show the bright blue screen instead of the snow, that snow and static will be virtually unknown to the next generation. I guess snow and static will become the manual tuning TVs and rotary dialing telephones of the future, (I can remember my parents having both of those, but only just!) relegated to appearing as effects in movies and songs.

Why do they do the blue screen on the TV thing by the way? Is it nessasary to steralise our view in this way?

It's a filter. I imagine Tally Isham's broadcasts, which are edited so if she gets a headache you don't feel it, work the same way. Personally, I've always been pretty fond of the ambience created by a television tuned to a dead channel. There's a bar not far from me that has half a dozen TV's in the window. All tuned, or off-tuned, to channels that come in poorly or are simply dead depending on the hour. Being the old black-and-white variety, they're a perfect example of what I always saw as the night sky above the port.

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Originally posted by T39andcounting:
I guess snow and static will become the manual tuning TVs and rotary dialing telephones of the future

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My sentiments exactly.

I used to tune in to snow channels on our TV on purpose. If you stare at them for a little while the snow starts forming patterns-- rotating swirls and even squares and cubes. I guess it just goes to show what an odd person I am.

Ne? Ne!

It wouldn't be static - that's an untuned TV. Here the TV is tuned to a pilot signal without content - a sort of nondescript grey. So I assumed, any way.

I think I first bought Neuromancer on the strength of that opening sentence alone.

TVs don't have snow anymore? Man, now that I think about it, my TV was made in 1980something. Maybe it's time for a new one.

And to stay in line with the thread, I see it as a grayish jumble caused by massive amounts of light pollution.

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If you stare at them for a little while the snow starts forming patterns-- rotating swirls and even squares and cubes

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That's like I always hear the phone ringing when I'm in the shower.

Very interesting for at least three reasons.
It means we must be prepared to explain this sentence to young ones : "you know, back then, the tv set received analog signals, and you had to set the channels yourself, blah, blah, boring stuff...)

The TV snow is a technological incident which bring poetry into every house.
Some over-rational Sony techies did replace it by a blue screen just because they could do it. they did not realize they were destroying something.

It is a part of a secret language that some kind of people use to recognize themselves. When I say that I used to look at the TV snow when listening music, I can see in people (women) eyes if they have enough imagination to undestand me. It's one these tests you can use when you are old enough not to fear people (women) POV on yourself.
I.e. when I read the first sentence of Neuromancer, I knew it was a book for me.

Lorien99

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Some over-rational Sony techies did replace it by a blue screen just because they could do it. they did not realize they were destroying something.

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More prosaicly, the blue screen irritatingly pops up over very bad signals that are nevertheless more than just static. Sometimes these ghostly traces of the ether are interesting to watch, certainly more interesting than the blue screen. (But, as other posters have said, so is pure static.)

I've read that opening paragraph more times than I can count, trying to figure out just what is the color of that damned sky.

At first, I thought of snow/static, but the thought of a flickering Chiba sky just didn't cut it for me.

It wasn't until I seriously nerded out and found myself of the world of computer networks, satellite broadcasting, and composite video that I had it figured out.

When looking at a composite waveform monitor, a dead channel is just that. Dead. Flatline. The wave is simply black-levels and blanking, telling the electron gun to fire just enough energy at each pixel so that the field hangs gasping at the lowest level of luminance. Everything becomes a dull glowing shade of nonblack, a pallid glaze unerringly conjuring the light-polluted sky that Case finds himself under, and beneath which we find ourselves in Gibson's world.

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Originally posted by caltrop:
I've read that opening paragraph more times than I can count, trying to figure out just what is the color of that damned sky.

At first, I thought of snow/static, but the thought of a flickering Chiba sky just didn't cut it for me.

It wasn't until I seriously nerded out and found myself of the world of computer networks, satellite broadcasting, and composite video that I had it figured out.

When looking at a composite waveform monitor, a dead channel is just that. Dead. Flatline. The wave is simply black-levels and blanking, telling the electron gun to fire just enough energy at each pixel so that the field hangs gasping at the lowest level of luminance. Everything becomes a dull glowing shade of nonblack, a pallid glaze unerringly conjuring the light-polluted sky that Case finds himself under, and beneath which we find ourselves in Gibson's world.

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That's interesting. Figured all the holograms projected over the city across Tokyo Bay would create a certain modulation in the color and brightness of the sky and that the sky itself wasn't actually static, but that ambient color that comes from a TV showing static. But I know of this dead channel color of which you speak. Enough to know that the monitor is on, but black levels such that doesn't really cast any light.
Well, I just messed my head out of one of my favorite openings in literature. But I'm really intrigued with everybody's input.

Arty friends of mine used to give a regular cyberpunk party called this. With a 'Bad Cyberpunk' contest. The first entry ever began:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to Phil Donahue.

Of course, that entry had to win -- there was no topping that.

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When looking at a composite waveform monitor, a dead channel is just that. Dead. Flatline. The wave is simply black-levels and blanking, telling the electron gun to fire just enough energy at each pixel so that the field hangs gasping at the lowest level of luminance. Everything becomes a dull glowing shade of nonblack, a pallid glaze unerringly conjuring the light-polluted sky that Case finds himself under, and beneath which we find ourselves in Gibson's world.

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that's so cool. poetic information I didn't know.

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he sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to Phil Donahue.

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so was that. for tickling my trash-o-meter. =;>

deny everything

On my TV, the AV in channel appears as a dead screen when there's no input; hard to describe because it gives off light in a dark room, but just barely enough to qualify it as gray instead of black. That's what I see...

Jeez, here we get tons of channels with snow...and I got a real new flatscreen TV...
The sky in Taipei gets that color a lot, I never had any problem visualizing it, although, for me, a much more evocative passage was when he describes the air as "having teeth tonight", which is exactly what it's like downtown here of a summer twilight, at more than 35 C and humidity's like 100+% and you can nearly taste the airborne particulate matter...
It's not as bad as it sounds...

Case, mon, Garvey a tug...