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by dcminter·6y ago·view on hn ↗
This is not super-relevant to the article, but I thought I would mention:

It often strikes me that the opening line of Neuromancer, which is something like "The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel" must be losing its meaning to newer readers.

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I've been replaying Mass Effect 3 recently and there's a little story someone tells, which starts with "Sky was color of vid-cam turned to a dead vorcha." That gave me a great chuckle.
A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out, as well as Gibson's failure to predict cell phones (which he is chagrined by).

Just the other day I was reading some early Neal Stephenson, and it made reference to 32-bit personal computers as being on the cutting edge. I guess you could read it as a period piece. Similarly, a novel about a computer that was written in the 1950s describes a machine a city block on a side, cooled by Niagra falls, with 1000 bits of storage, that somehow still forms the pillar of a surveillance society.

Novel writers are not the best predictors of technology, it would appear. That's okay.

> A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out

It was Gaiman in his series introduction to the Penguin Galaxy [1] reprint in hardcover of Neuromancer, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Once and Future King, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Stranger in a Strange Land.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGX/penguin-galaxy...

>with 1000 bits of storage

Did anybody really write that? The first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby (1948), had 1024 bits of storage. Even assuming no miniaturization, just scaling up contemporary computers would have gotten you more than 1000 bits.

I forget the name of the book, but yes, they really did write that. It wasn't a mainstream author, if that matters.

(It might have been a megabit, but it sure wasn't much compared to what you need in order to run a computerized dystopia...).

I think that line has survived quite well. In the 1980s, this implied flickering static noise. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the colour of missing input on TVs was often blue, which is perhaps less fitting the scene. But these days, a "dead channel" would presumably be interpreted as the TV not having any source input, and is often just black.
I wonder if modern readers would envision something like this: https://allhomosapienswelcome.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/when-...
Ed: whoops, not Pratchett, Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

Xxxx xxxx

Terry Pratchett realized this... I can't find the quote now, but one of his books (Good Omens?) starts "The sky was the perfect blue of a television tuned to a dead channel..." (can't recall if "over the port" is in there).

You are thinking of 'Neverwhere', by Neil Gaiman!
Quite.
I've actually never been certain which thing it meant. I own some very old TVs that glow a sort of metallic gray color. Most TVs from the 70s and 80s have a sharp white-on-black snow pattern. In the 90s you got those weird solid blue screens. All seem like semi-reasonable skies, to me.
And similarly, I wonder how long HBO will stick to their logo animation, with the static - it's a strange anachronism now, and looks terrible in streamed format, since random noise is essentially incompressible.

Edit: I'm sure this is discussed back and forth ad nauseam at HBO...