Or, copyright had gone *so* insane, the only freely available stuff in 2077 was the stuff that was at least a hundred years old (kinda like now, the only Zorro movie that can be streamed without explicit copyright permissions, is the one from 1920).

I meant that if the soceity does not change the music it makes would not change either.

The only music we here is from Three Dog (outside of the patriotic songs of the Enclave and violin music of Agatha). It seems obvious Three Dog has a passion for pre-rock standards. This keeps in the mood of the game.

Other than that we know nothing of the music past the divergence. The only reference we have in Fallout 3 in a terminal in the Citadel that states that subliminal messages in current music of 2077 holds promise to boost enlistment in the military.

So we don't know if Rock n Roll, The Beatles etc. ever happened in the Fallout 3. Given what we know, it is likely music in the next 120 years was similar to the music of the 1940s/1950s.

They have pretty advanced (looking) computers in Vaults in labs, i'd dare to say that they were supercomputers like for example our days supercomputers are. Well US had long traditions with China of (cold or hot) war, so maybe government just got most new computers to be distributed, while private individuals got just leftovers from government.

Well unlike Elderscrolls lore, Fallout lore shouldn't be taken too seriously i guess.

There are huge AI supercomputers, but personal computers are much less advanced and flexible than ours. It can now be seen as paradoxical, but was pretty much common in the science fiction of that era (and even later - see e.g. Star Trek: The Original Series).

Part of this is because back in the '50s, it was thought that fusion (and more efficient fission) power and artificial intelligence were "easy" problems, with solutions right around the corner. What our scientists discovered is that both of these are a lot harder than they seem. (It doesn't help that the definition of AI keeps getting pushed back/tightened every time someone makes something that seems "too human".)

I don't think the point of Fallout is to be plausible science fiction. Rather, it's a recreation of the kind of science fiction thought plausible in the 1950s era. If you read them, they've got all sorts of stuff - even the "hard" SF authors like Clarke and Bester have psychic powers in some of their books, and nuclear technology and even the basics of radiation, not as well understood by the public as today, are strangely used. In Bester's The Stars my Destination you've got a character who's radioactive and kills people near him by that, but suffers few ill effects himself; this is absurd, but that's the sort of thing they wrote.

Fallout seems to me to be dealing more with the ideas of politics in the immediate post-war period - nuclear brinkmanship, hardcoe right-wing politics in the States and that heady mix of apocalypse and utopian fantasy. It's really a lot like Bioshock, to be honest, and I only came to the Fallout series at 3 and therefore it reminds me of Bioshock even though I readily acknowledge that the pollination of ideas went the other way.

As for the AI question, nobody really had any idea just how massive a task it was to make it work, and they didn't really get an idea until computer technology caught up with the plans and proved them hopelessly crude. They had no idea that the computers would become as advanced as they are, while yet being unable to solve this problem.

How I explain the world of .'Fallout'. is that both the hippie and .'Great Society'. movement(s) never occured; thus, the culture of 1950s lives onwards. The personal computers, I explain by two things; A, the punch card computer evolved into the internet; and B, transistor evolved the way the micro chip did. The transistor was invented in 1947, after all.

The guns I explain by the fact, Eugene Stoner never developed the AR15; thus the FAL, AK47, and CETME;
they were developed as .556mm weapons, not 7.62mm weapons. That also explains why the M14 is not present in the game.

The energy weapons, I explain them by multiple technological developments; ranging from solar to atomic and that explains both the laser and plasma weapon(s) in the game.

But how is technology thriving, in this post H-Bomb world? Many groups are reverse engineering technologies, kind of like how my Romanian WASR10 is a clone of the Russian AK47; different levels of technologies would lead to different cloning abilities. The factories themselves are small facilities, most probably underground and thus avoid attacks by monsters like Rodan.

Has anyone considered that the world of 2077 was, in fact, nothing like it is remembered in the Fallout universe. We know there was a nuclear holocaust that destroyed essentially everything, including recorded history. As a result, whatever representation of the past is accepted in (for instance) 2277 would be derived from whatever meager records survived and 200 years of storytelling passed through generations.

Frankly, the people of Fallout don't seem (for the most part) especially concerned with the study of history, is it really so surprising that their view of the past would be distorted?

Well, in Fallout 3 in that Tranquility Lane if you activate the 'Chinese Invasion' or look at all the [censored] that seemed to be going on with China and the US, which took place in the 50's its most likely a 50's doomsday theory. I mean, the computers are just terminals for storing information and unlocking doors/safes, they had computers back then, and they were these huge things that did the same thing, all I can see the difference is, the Terminals are smaller and can do slightly more, and THINK OF THIS, imagine our normal future games, robots, super-computers, etc., okay what if in 2050, a future were all our expectations were kicked the [censored] out of by modern culture, they make a futuristic game based on OUR beliefs, so things would be, different than the are at the time.

Exactly, fallout is the future as the 50s saw it.

Well said. The Fallout universe is not, and never was intended to be, 1998 Sci-fi. Fallout is 1950s Sci-fi that was made in 1998. Think of Fallout as if it were a game based on some classic Sci-fi book and that distinction should sink in. Nobody in the 50s saw the Vietnam war, the feminist movement, the silicon semiconductor, or the equal rights movement coming so it simply wasn't included in the Fallout universe.

good anology. Yup the timeling split somewhere in the thirties and nuclear technology/power became far more practical whil in our world networking/computers boomed.

Yep.

I think we're sort of over-thinking this.

There are robots and an abundance of nuclear power because that's how the future was envisioned in 1950's scifi. Writers of the time did not anticipate such things as the information or cultural revolutions, or the internal collapse of the USSR, so these things didn't happen.

One of the great joys of the original Fallout was seeing the juxtaposition of the cheery and optimistic, automated and plastic future of 1950's literature and advertising with the reality of how it really might have turned out if the world had resorted to large scale nuclear war.

This vision has degraded somewhat since the first Fallout with the subsequent additions to the franchise. It's hard to maintain that juxtaposition and still fill in the world's back-story - especially knowing what we know today. Every question the developers answer about how X is possible without necessary precondition Y, raises additional questions. As we fill these in, the juxtaposition that gives the series it's charm slowly disintegrates.

In my opinion it's best to leave the time between 1950 and 2077 largely unexplored, full of contradictory rumors and logical problems. This gives the world a certain mystery and makes the contrast between the world's idyllic past and its hellish present that much more striking.

You know when this game was made right?

Of course. 1997.

But that doesn't change the fact that the game is set in an alternate future that was idealized by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Science_Fiction of the 1950s.

Okay by the sounds of your post it sounded like you thought the game was made in the 50s.

Please Please, just call me Strangelove, and to let you all know, the War Room is doing just fine after the bombs, the BOS has taken care of everything. Oh and please if you are ever in the neiborhood, please stop by, my brain is in a brainbot.

The point at all is that Fallout is the vision that people of the '50s had of the future. That is why it is all futuristic with the art deco style everywere. Its not an excuse or anything like, this was deliberated made this way as an artistic creation "IF the future happened in the way people on 50' exactly trought?'...

Other example... if it were the idealization of the people of 60 and 70' about the 21h century, we would have the Jetsons families future.

The computers as i read on other lore are made of valves, big lamps. Semiconductors never appeared, and they remained with big anologic computers. This is also a reason why there are only mainframes, and the bots are usually a misture of biological or biological kind of hardware, like brainbot.

I think the simplest answer to all of this is that it is just yesterday's "World of Tomorrow" gone horribly wrong. Don't try to overthink it. It's a mix of old "big science" and pop sci-fi (robots and rayguns and all that). It's only set that far in the future to make those advances seem somewhat plausable while still using the tech or projected tech of the 50's hopeful future.

Take a look at the cars, for example, with their nuclear reactor engines that explode real nice when you shoot them. Ford proposed a nuclear concept car in 1957 that those cars are visually based on called the Nucleon. A working prototype was never made, but that's what people were seeing as the future at the time. Fallout is a future past that never would materialize.

Everyone says it's the future how it looked in the 50s, but I never saw any piece of art, be it pictures or books, that showed computers as big primitive machines.

http://hackedgadgets.com/wp-content/2/1950s-computer.jpg

Look in a history book sometime.

Yes! Rap,pop rock, and punk rock never came to be !!