I'm fairly sure it's the official line, the Fallout universe is a fork of our own.

my thought if of this, The great wars has a parallel in our own universe, the Korean war almost and could of caused WWIII because Douglas MacArthur when the Chinese came across the north Korean border when we were almost at victory and were being pushed back wanted to drop A-bomb along the border of north Korea and china to halt the advance of Chinese. This would have caused us to go to war with china, and i mean a full war as in communist versus democracy thus could fully and most likely caused the use of A-bombs but china at the time didn't have nuclear bomb till 1966.

if looked this up on a fewwebsites including the vault and apparently the FO universe followed the same path as ours up until a point where it divulged thhis point is when in our worl d we concentrated on making computers smaller and more power the FO universe concentrated on nuclear power thats why in FO computers are massive also radiation works completely differently in FO so instead of high levels of radiation killing you it causes mutations and ghoulification

I didn't read most of the replies, but Fallout is the world of the future as seen from the 1950s if the transistor and subsequent microprocessor technology had never been invented. All the electronics in Fallout are clunky and work the way they do because they're full of vacuum tubes. So things like computers being green screens and robots looking clunky is from no microchips; things like plasma rifles are from SCIENCE!

Fallout, falls into the genre of Alternate History, which can take the form of anything from the Nazis winning WW2, all the way to smaller things such as Beta becomes the cassette of choice over VHS.

Fallout is basically and simply described as a fictional / Sci Fi world.....based upon what people in the 50's thought the world of tomorrow would be. That is the main purpose to the Fallout world, and the main thing it stands on is the fictional ideas of the people in the 50's. Down to nuclear power was the way to the future, to talking and flying robots.....and radiation that could turn a regular size ant into a very big ant. All these ideas came from comic books from the 50's....tv shows from the 50's and so forth, the time line is changed mainly because Fallout is a fictional reality that has no main event that causes it to change from our own.....at least that has been written into the story line that we know of.

One things that sort of amuses me is....they have nuclear powered cars and other nuclear powered devices yet...they were fighting over oil......

As is explained in the backstory, Nuclear Fusion was only just becoming viable in the commercial and home sectors, there are still a heck of a lot of fossil fuel power plants and vehicles out there that industry relied on. In addition Oil isnt just an energy source, its a key component in plastics and is a lubricant.

True. I had forgotten about that. I turned 40 last year and I think my warranty ran out and am now experiencing severe malfunctions.

yeah that sounds right.

I must say, in a video game SCIEEENCE!!! is generally far more entertaining.