Does the Internet Exist in Fallout? 

fun fact: MIT was a node in arpnet, so in theory cit and in extension the institute has (or had) access to the network

Interestingly enough, before Walt Disney died, he was working on the EPCOT project EPCOT was supposed to be a self-contained and fully functional town. Part of what he had wanted to try and do was have education done over the internet for courses in science to bring exprrts from places like NASA into the home, but the tech didn't exist in the state it needed to be for him to realize his vision. There's a vid here on RU-vid where he went over his vision himself. It was shot weeks before his death and was meant for investor eyes only, not for the general public.

One thing that isn’t mentioned is the Boston Public Library in Fallout 4, which has a terminal that's connected to similar terminals in every other library in the "Union of Public Libraries", which allowed for the transmission and receiving of information, mainly reading material found in each respective library's archives. However, a unique aspect of it was its ability to send and receive images, since some youths got in trouble for viewing the covers of some specific material.

My theory has always been that in this timeline they focused on nuclear technology so much the government didn’t bother to expand their network capabilities. However, my other theory is since in our timeline the internet was created by the government, the same as Fallout, they did develop it but kept it secret.

This question is actually something I had been wondering about recently! I’m running a game of Fallout: The Roleplaying Game with the main villain as a sentient AI. My players recently convinced him to kill himself but I was trying to figure out if a sentient AI would be able to escape the one computer they found him on

A nugget to think on, given the background of the Resource Wars, the 20th year or so when the nukes flew in 2077, having a barebones internet like that of the early 1980s could be a retrograde to keep people worldwide from finding out news in other countries similar to Orwell's 1984, the perpetual war and the armies never cross the borders to prevent 'cultural contamination'

As someone who took his Comptia A+ cert test, I love that you explained networks and TCP/IP. Never thought I'd get that in a Fallout video

also, a thing to note: the fact we call them all terminals, means they almost _certainly_ didn't have a local operating system, and instead were connected to a server of some kind. Because a terminal is, for most purposes, just a glass display with a keyboard, that replaced using a teletype with paper and a fancy typewriter, at least in real world tech. And considering some of the cobbled together terminals from Fallout 4's setllement building mode... I think we can conclude that isn't far off base!

they all shared memes, but it was only Marty Robbins memes

As a former airline agent I knew Sabre was an old piece of software, but I didn't realize it was from the 60s. That explains so, so much...

I have recently started getting back into fallout. Now channels like you can help feed my addiction

With BBS limited to phone lines, the speed was pretty slow. It would take around 1 hour to download just ONE IMAGE. The image will be sent encrypted, and then your BBS program would decrypt the downloaded image. Folks has to wait for 14.4 dial-up modems to where you could play Doom II deathmatches with someone else. Two-way voice communication was not possible when doing this. (Added) If you lost your BBS connection during an image download, you had to connect back in and then start all over for the image download.

I always imagined fallout internet like cyberpunk internet several closed off systems and net works maybe each state or common wealth having its own internet system

The Fallout series can make someone really appreciate our technology since we have existing technologies that are way better than most of Fallouts equivalent technologies except certain like robotics and energy weapons for example. We still have like 54 years till we get to 2077 so we got time to outdo them on what we currently lack in!

Funnily enough, the begining of the movie 'WarGames (1983)' is probably the best representation of hacking in a movie to date.

Every time I hear about data being written to some physical storage medium and sent via mail, I remember a story my father likes to tell: I don't recall the exact year, but a guy he worked with would write data on architectural plans to floppy disks and mail them over to another building for use. Whenever they'd arrive, however, the data would be unusable - somehow damaged or corrupted. So he decided one day to follow one of these floppy disks along its entire trip, and found that a secretary was putting labels on them by... sticking the floppy drive in the top of a typewriter like it's a piece of paper. damaging it in the process.

I think your estimation of the relative "age" of the Fallout internet is spot on. I'm btw old enough to have been trained in how to access the DIALOG system, basically a database of research databases, via Telnet. This was in the later half of the 90s, and the technology was already obsolescent, so I've never actually had to use that training at any point in my carreer, but still.

There was internet connection links in the 80’s and 90’s also by ham radio. It could be that some of those systems were completely wireless in Fallout.

I wonder if an IRC or mIRC style chat system that was lost within the terminals of the prewar. Beyond this, I liked the idea. I recall that in Fallout 76, the West Coast was talking to the BoS scouts on a satellite based comm system, and it makes me wonder if the "internet" of fallout was wired for local, but satellite based for wider communication networks.

great video. for me, i'd say the internet still exists in fallout but as a static database of all information stored before the War. the only people who could make changes to it on private networks would be those with major technological capabilities, e.g. the Enclave, the Brotherhood Of Steel, and the Institute, though i could see either House in New Vegas and/or the NCR being able to do so as well.

RadKing's content never disappoints.

I did not know until now that the logo for Skynet (of Terminator fame) looked so very similar to the Milnet logo.

If I remember correctly there are a few terminals in old world blues that state big mountain was in communication with the Sierra Madre so perhaps Elijah originally accessed the network there

This was REALLY well done and super thought-provoking! Maybe I'm just an engineering nerd, but I absolutely love your videos focusing on fallout's infrastructure

The amount of research this probably took, honestly it’s impressive man. You’re truly one of the best. Doing some of the best deep dives on things I never knew I wanted to know

I remember making a comment on what was the "internet" like in the Fallout universe in the "WTF is with Inflation in Fallout?" video and came to a similar conclusion but based on how media is distributed and consumed in the Fallout universe. No video or audio streaming; no online gaming just local computer using holotapes or tabletop gaming; Radio, tv, newspapers and comics are alive and well. There was no disruption in those areas due to the limited computing capacity available to the public. Most of the networks available are local or private networks with limited connectivity between them. So I like the conclusion that theres no internet per se, and mostly use text interfaces and services. Good video.

HyperText Markup Language or HTML was the base for all internet information sharing between mainframes before the use of servers and was text-based, using "ASCII", just like on the terminals in Fallout. Early graphics were text and character-based. In about 1995, Netscape, called Mosaic at the time, first integrated pictures, pics, in the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format with HTML. Windows made BMP pic files the most popular format to incorporate with HTML. Bit Map Images. And from there it all exploded to what we have today. I love old-school computers. I am old. LOL.

Fallout 4's Robco Sales and Services Center has logs worth noting on the subject. One mentions an "office network" explicitly and another that mentions a seven year old computer is only suitable for text documents and word parser games, which gives a good indication of what level the "normal" terminal is in power.

So funny that you should release this video when you did. I am playing in a ttrpg of Fallout through the Exodus system. I am running a technician type character and I took the field scientist class as an advance class. In the progression of the class they eventually get a minor and major breakthrough to some sort of "discovery" I have talked with my Vault master about my discovery being able to access posiedon networks to disable security and other network access options with a pip boy. I shall definitely have to send this along to him.

In fallout 3 there is a couple cases of digitized pictures taken from a camera being shown on a terminal, vault 101 on their survey team where they took pictures of megaton and giant ants. This shows, at least from bethesda's perspective, that they are capable of displaying images. Fallout 4 and 76 makes this unrealistic with their pipboy games though.

Fun fact. BBS systems like this still exist over VHF ham radio and use Terminal Node Controller (TNC) devices. Many are made by a company called Kantronics. You have to use a terminal emulator program to interface with them. These same TNC boxes are used to interface between radios and computers for the Winlink radio email network. Expect speeds of 1200 baud.

in the cold war times, there was a "Intranet", basically the internet but reserved to militally and scientists, so ( since fallout is heavilly based on that ) is techinally yes and in pratice no.

I always love to see people talking about the Arpanet, rare is the credit to the giant who shoulders is being stand on.

Mods aren't canon but Fallout New California had something like an internet messaging system cause you can interact with a story character early on.

It's kinda weird how a society that can create fully self-aware AIs also uses equipment that went out of production in our world's 1980s.

Thank you for covering this, this is something I wondered whenever I visited the vault 21 LAN terminals or hearing the Commonwealth brotherhood revive wireless reports from the prydwen and such.

The "Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends" quote in the emoticon section got a laugh out of me!

We've lost one of our own. Rip mitten squad.

Your content just gets better and better. Please continue with your remasters

18:11 that poster reminds me of a 1970s entrance display for a theme park known as "action park" known as the first water park to feature a full vertical loop in it's waterslide. also last as it was later figured out that people lost teeth and broke bones going down it.

Funny you mentioned Gill Bates (or rather Gilbert) - such character exists in Arcanum. ;)

Also remember that Vault tech has a network that spans all of it's stuff and maybe is connected to others.

I don’t remember seeing anything about an internet in any of my own sleuthing, but I have noticed “intranets” a few times. That being says, I imagine that internet or the early 90s would’ve been unimaginable in the Fallout universe.

13:51 Very unexpected to see Norwegian here. It says "Can be connected to host machines and terminals" and "Can be connected to host machines".

I'm one of the older gamers. I remember before windows was released we used to play a lot of dos games. One of my faviroutes was something called Battle Chess. The Chess pieces would turn into gollems, the knight would get on his horse and ride it. Then there was a game called Eagle Eye Detective. You had a pick between a boy or girl and solve small crimes in a small town. You had to question suspects and look for clues. So even before the internet and windows we already had some good games we could play on a simple system like dos. There no reason that the Fallout world couldn't have developed some graphics for their computer networks. With Mr House and the Securitrons facial interface there is proof of that.

The phosphorous green that's the default colour of Fallout terminal and Pip-Boy screens remind me of the Apple IIe monitors my school had waaaay back when. Also similar to the original GameBoy as well.

I'm happy I'm not the only person that has pondered this! Thanks for making a video for us. Oh! I'm not sure if you remember my comment from a few months back: I mentioned I had never played FO1, and intended on doing so. Well, I started it, and I'm absolutely loving it! I can't overstate how fun it is!

Fellow Utahn here and Zion is not the middle of nowhere! Having grown up near Springdale, I can confirm that it’s a tourist trap next to the middle of nowhere!

I study networking and computers as part of my job so it was immensely satisfying for you to go into definitions and detail rather than taking a sinplified approach

There is references to the Vaults having an inter-vault network, the fact that VaultTec was supposedly going to monitor the progress of the experiment and the all clear signal support this. Yes the all clear signal could have been done via radio or other wireless methods, but I have yet to find a vault with wireless receivers or transmitters.

Are LAN-parties still a thing? Playing to early morning with the power of caffeine, then sleeping under the desk. Yesterdays roomtemp pizza as late breakfast. Those fun times.

Happy holidays Randking. Hope Adem smiles on you and the rest of the Radking family this holiday season.

This video is a life saver! I've been planning a campaign for my friends to play in the fallout ttrpg game, and the way it starts is a scientist in the party's home vault somehow getting the attention of a local branch of the Enclave. I had no idea how to do that until the mention of the Enclave-Vault Research Control that could be accessed through Posiedonet! Now I've got a lore friendly and logical way for that to work!

I always thought that a variant existed, given the dozens of computers I've accessed across both BGS entries and Obsidian's... but it was damned interesting to hear you expand on it here. Thanks for this, and may you and yours have a wonderful Christmas Day (as of this comment). 👊

As someone just learning computers in the early 90s, this video aged me a couple hundred years and I definitely became a ghoul at the point of 23:30 "using the tel-net protocol" . Gonna go uudecode a multipart usenet post now. (the DARPANET internet was meant to survive outages when parts of the networks got nuked and still be able to route packets around breaks. It perfectly fits the Fallout fiction.)

the project from your friend is so cool !!! now somebody has to build a fallout terminal that will run this robco softwear !!! ... #Respect

That is thorough research and great analysis. I agree with your conclusion. Excellent work!

In fallout 76 one of the wiped out raiders did make a system he called the Enternet you can find the terminal in one of roses missions im pretty sure

You know it's a good day when radking post

There are no slurs for ghouls, genocide earns bad karma and capitalism is still praised as a decent way to run society…no, there clearly is no internet in Fallout.

Two things that nerd me out when it comes to subjects fallout, and computing history. I’ve also seen some evidence of forms similar to discord or early Reddit, or anything like that where people could have recreation time such as play DND, discuss other stuff I’ve even seen references to people playing a campaign of DND or something on the terminals glory to Adam. Love your videos.

Wouldn't MIT in fallout have more LANs and WANs in Massachusetts? Shouldn't it have a big brick of telecommunication building? Kinda like how AT&T makes there buildings to withstand a nuke?

This is a great video. Most Fallout videos can be kind of dull because with the games being contained within a closed universe wherein ever piece of information can be easily read about in full on the wiki, there’s really not much to talk about when you know most of what there is to know. These are the kinds of questions I didn’t know you could ask about the Fallout universe that are very captivating

Me cracking 90s on my local RobCo computer on these damn clankers

You're right, the tech in the fallout universe is pretty much 1980s computer tech. the 64KB Free on the startup of the Pipboy is very similar to what the Commodore 64 had on its screen when you first turned it on. In college in the 80s, we used to log on to arpanet and had to type everything in using telnet and Unix commands. In 1993, when I was graduating from college, a college professor of mine got a Beta copy of Mosaic and let me play with it because I was running a BBS at the time. For mail and messaging I used Fidonet which packets were sent and received twice a day at 14.4kbs, so email was pretty slow in todays standards. He said this software (he didn't call it a browser) is going to change the world. The Fallout universe didn't get into 90s tech and most likely was dealing with dialup and probably some satellite GPS tech on the Pipboy for the map system. The universe definitely didn't follow Moore's law and they never went fully digital like we are today, and still on vacuum tube tech, hence why a lot of the circuitry didn't get fried after the nuclear blast.

I remember in college I had to do a presentation on an important historical event, you could pick your own topic. For me it was the creation of the internet. I geeked out over this video multiple times, I remember everything I learned. However another question I have for the lore of fallout is what caused the Internets invention. If you don’t know in our world the Cuba Crisis caused fear of an attack on radio systems, communication and was incredibly important and we only had Radio. So as a back up we started creating the internet through Lan. So did the timeline in Fallout have the Cuba crisis or is it a much newer invention created to combat the Chinese. Thus it’s very much in it’s infancy.

Now that i payed attention to it, that note that mention BBS is from 1968, so fallout has something close to an microcomputer (because i don't imagine the guy who has an minicomputer on his office using it for anything but work) since the 1960s, tho i can be incorrect on this and he had an minicomputer at home for personal use I would love to have an video about the computers of fallout :)

Funny enough Gil Bates was a character in the more or less Fallout book series called Deathlands and its sister series Outlanders. A frozen pre-war tech genius who unthawed 200 years after the apocalypse.

So they had a shitty version of the internet

To be honest, the Fallout computers and their systems always made me think more of the french system "MINITEL", an ancestor of the Internet made by the French government in the late 1970s

"Nawwww, House be wilding💀💀💀" *picture of securitrons obliterating legion soldiers on hoover dam*

Emoticons date back to at least 1881 ... The Internet, was preceded by internets , networks of networks one of which was (D)ARPANET which became the prototype and hub of a lot of them ... most of which later were all joined together to form The Internet, but a few are still separate even today .... Fallout still having a proto-Internet makes sense based on the in world history

I would 100% think the internet or something very similar would exist in the Fallout universe as there are tons of prewar emails back and fourth on different terminals across each game.

Waiting for a new video from RadKing almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.

As someone with a background in Computer Networking, this made me very happy. Well done, RadKing

Sadly, I recall using much of these archaic systems... Great work, yet again an interesting amalgam

The only thing I can think of for this is the fact the sentry bot prototype in 4 can be seemingly wirelessly activated as it can be controlled from the holotape even if it’s from the pipboy

Video conferencing isn’t just about networking, image/video processing and compression technology is essential since sending raw video is several hundred times slower than sending compressed stream. Video codec requires knowledge in Fourier analysis, signal processing, image processing, human vision, coding theory and technical knowhows like block-based coding and rate control that can only be achieved by enormous amount of contributions from many groups of engineers. By itself it is as big as the advancement of the internet.

I’ve literally never considered this. Cool idea for a video!

this is one of those questions that i keep asking myself about the setting for this game when i'm playing it, then immediately forgetting i asked

Your arguments make sense and give a good estimation. We should also note that with Fallouts pre war politics, lack of resources, resources going to military. That the state of their internet makes sense. Perhaps technology like that stagnated at times even as there was no need to develope it more. It did what the military wanted. There was no reason to bring it to enemy or unstable countries so keeping it in america made sense. And home terminals for private use were probably expensive like the first home PCs in our world. So makes sense they are more bound to commerical stuff, institutions, the rare private people and so on.

Great analysis AND history of the internet in our reality. Thanks!

>>When you remember BBS and feel concerned that people didn't know about them.

I love your fallout content so much

for some reason this makes me more motivated to think on hypotheticals for my fallout 4 mod plan/idea

An interesting thing is some terminals in buildings, especially ones that repeat the same contents as others. Seem to be very close to Dumb Terminals, which are more or less a direct input to a localized mainframe. This is of the days where they had room spanning computers. Interfaces were anything from literal printers that printed out displays, to full screen interfaces. Not to mention the infrastructure of the early Internet was through modems which modulated the data to be sendable over phone lines. That's why old browsers like NetZero used to have the infamous 'dial up' tone. The data was literally audible sound back then. In fact the first connection for computers was literally a device you put you corded phone on, called an 'acoustic coupler'. Your computer would literally 'talk' over the phone line, but it you answered your phone or picked it up it would kill it's very delicate connection. Early tape medium was the same way, storing data essentially as audio on tapes. (Like literally cassette tapes). There were some experiments and hobbyists who tried broadcasting data over radio, but the problem with that is you would only be able to broadcast. You wouldn't be able to request unless you called in.

I wonder If Y.2.K. or something similar happened causing the Tech Gaps in Fallout?

What's really cool is there are still some BBSs active you can access through the telnet command in Windows CMD!

17:23 could there possibly just be a “National parks network” that serviced America’s National parks and also related interests like companies/organizations that would have worked with them?

great video , thank you

it makes you wonder what happened between the 1980s and 2070s, did computer communication technology stand still for 80 years, or did it emerge far later than in our world? Is it a mix where it developed at a far slower pace, AND stagnated/developed along very different (but more primitive) lines for decades?

So… RoboCoOS can play the OG Fallout. If that's the case, then it should also play Castle Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM?

They had networks and what seemed to be at least larger regional networks, but I don't think they had web pages like we did.

I remember using Telnet to get onto BBS's in the early 90's. Good times, they were the only place I could talk about things like RPGs and not get beaten up! Heh. :)

As someone who lives in Utah unless you're in the Salt Lake area it's really middle of nowhere 😂

Since there’s no TikTok, I’d much rather live in the Fallout timeline

Deathclaw fan fiction erotica had me cracking up a bit. Good job Rad King. This sounds like the sort of thing that belongs at the Deathclaw Sanctuary and Menagerie I built on Spectacle Island.

This channel is just epic, hardcore. Fo 4 fan here we fans love u bro.

I remember reading somewhere that they think abraham lincoln was one of the earlier uses of an emoticon in one of his writings. I could be misremembering, but I think it was a very rudimentary and blocky looking smiley face.

Can’t believe mitten squad is gone rest in peace