The 1984 Gibson novel Neuromancer begins with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”

At the time, this unambiguously meant speckled gray TV static. However, before too many years had passed, new TVs started displaying a flat blue screen when tuned to a dead channel.

And in 1996, Neil Gaiman riffed on Gibson’s line, in Neverwhere: “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”