A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
The static on old CRT TVs with rabbit ears was the cosmic microwave background. No one in the last 25 years has ever seen it.
Opening line of Neuromancer doesn't make much sense any more "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Well, not really. The cosmic microwave background radiation was a tiny fraction of that noise. What everyone saw was mostly thermal noise generated by the amplifier circuit inside the TV.
#CHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSH
Hair stands up
CRTs was in use well into the 2000s
Even before the 2000s they started showing a blue screen instead of static.
That wasn't just a digital or flat panel thing.
But of course old sets were around for a long time.
My memory of the exacts here are fuzzy, but I think this depended on whether or not your TV picked up digital signal, analog, or both. I remember around that time we had a TV that would pick up static on some channels and have a blue input screen on others.
It's definitelly an analog over the air TV thing.
The way digital works you would either get a "No signal" indicator (because the circuitry detects the signal to noise ratio is too low) or squarish artifacts (because of the way the compression algorithms for digital video are designed).
Technically, it's not about the display technology, but instead about the signal/tuner. More specifically if it's analog or digital. Some modern TVs still have analog or hybrid tuners for backwards compatibility and regions that still use analog, so they can display static. For instance, in Ukraine we finished the switch to digital TV only a couple of years ago. If your TV had no digital tuner (as was the case for many) you had to buy a DAC box. Retirees/pensioners got them for free, sponsored by the government.
Yeah I was still using a CRT as recently as 2012. I think OP means analogue TVs.
CRTs were fairly common until the early-mid 10s
I'd say born after 2008ish aren't likely to be familiar with them, except seeing the odd one in their grandparents bedroom
By the way, the picture illustrating the post isn't actually displaying the real thing - the noise in it is too squarish and has no grey tones.
TV static in recent movies and shows that are set in the past almost always instantly pull me out of the narrative because no one seems to be able to get it right and some are just stunningly bad. It's usually very subtle, so much so that I'm not sure I could even describe what's wrong. Makes me feel old to notice it.
I think the problem is because CRT displays didn't have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had "dots" of all sizes.
Also another possible thing that's off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?
The noise is basically the product of radio waves at all frequencies with various intensities (though all low) with only the ones that could pass the bandpass filter of the TV tuner coming through (and being boosted up in intensitity by automatic gain control) and being painted along a phosphorous screen (hence no pixels) as the beam draw line by line the screen 25 times per second so to get that effect right you probably have to simulate it mathematically from a starting point of random radio noise and it can't be going through things with pixels (such as 3D textures) to be shown and probably requires some kind of procedural shader.
I was born in the 90s, my brothers were born in the early 2000s. We had a CRT into the early 2010s . Maybe people who weren't poor haven't seen real TV static but even then I doubt it. Hell, remember those god awful "flat screen" CRTs? My old station still had one of those that we used to watch TV on in 2018-19. It's probably still there lol
I actually liked the flat screen crts. I have a 1080p flatscreen crt and I love it. Can’t use it though because I’m scared my kids will get crushed by it.
When I was growing up the cat used to interact with the TV. It was on the floor for a while so it was fun.
Yep, my family had a CRT that we used until sometime around 2015.
My family had several tvs that did this until around 2013
On a CRT? Sure, probably a lot haven't seen it. On a modern TV? Still possible for some - mine does this if I hit the channel button rather than volume accidentally.
No one in the last 25 years has ever seen it.
I mean you can still find a CRT today and turn it on if you like, they're less common for sure, but they're still around if you're looking for one
yeah i have
Movies depicting this haven't vanished from existence though
The trope of video/audio breaking down into static is an easy shorthand that is unlikely to be forgotten, probably even well after all the devices capable of doing so have long since been buried in the landfill.
It's especially hilarious in media depicting the far-flung future, where apparently all technologically advanced space men and their communications devices -- not to mention high powered central supercomputers and so on and so forth -- somehow still work over NTSC television signals. Even by the early 1980's it should have been entirely predictable that in "the future" anything like that would be digital, considering we already had widespread digital audio media (CD's), and digital video was already making inroads into the computing industry.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. - William Gibson, Neuromancer
One of the most beautiful opening lines to a novel.
I think they call it "analog horror noise" now, along with vhs cassettes.
...
Feel the passage of time XD
I have seen this on a much newer TV last year. It didnt just disappear
or a new smaller tv sitting on top of the old, wood frame tv as a stand now
You can still hear it on the radio. Although most of the noise floor is probably man made.
Except for that most of it was not.
A lot of the noise on the screen (and speaker) was affected by radiation from nearby stuff.
I'd think that nowadays, it would be even more so, with way more WiFi and mobile phone signals everywhere. Now sure, different frequencies mean they would affect less, but the cumulative effect would still be more than the CMBR.
Also, I have a flat-screen CRT at home.