Written on a typewriter, in a Vancouver apartment, by a man who had never used a computer and was in a state of open panic that somebody else was about to publish the same book first.

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984 — first sentence

For forty years the object was in every room in the country. A set with no signal: grey, granular, faintly lit from within, moving continuously and going nowhere. Weather over a working harbour at the hour when the light arrives from every direction at once and nothing casts a shadow.

Then the equipment changed. A set with no signal is a flat saturated blue, or a menu in a corporate typeface, or a black rectangle waiting to be given an input.

Nothing in the sentence moved. The nine words stand as printed in every edition, and the sky they describe is now a bright clear afternoon over a pleasant harbour, and the reader arriving at it today is doing precisely what the reader was asked to do.

The text is intact. The thing it points at was replaced without notice.