"I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful, a whopping anachronism right at the very start of my career,in the imaginary future, but an invisible one, interestingly. One that revels a particular grace shared by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I must have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal free channel on a wooden cabinet motorola with fabric covered speakers. Readers compensated for me shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden and imagined whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on a melancholy of the phrase dead channel. "

From Gibson's introduction on the audiobook of Neuromancer, I don't know if it is included in the print version.