Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power.

Background
A fundamental building block of modern electronic devices and systems. The transistor revolutionized the field of electronics and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers. Computers in the Fallout universe are more cumbersome than the ones in our world and most still use monochromatic, text-based displays. The personal computer as it exists in our world was never fully developed due to these limitations on compactness, and some computers still exist as large mainframes that can take up whole rooms. The users access them via terminals. Nonetheless, some mainframes are highly advanced in terms of processing power, such as those capable of running artificial intelligence.

Microchips also do appear to exist and can be seen among common household items, super computers, and energy weapons alike throughout the series.

Characteristics

 * {{color|gray|The Reavers say various statements about the transistor, including, "For the glory of the transistor!" and "Wait! Is this transistor reverse biased?"
 * The Cabot House terminal entries directly mention transistors, "I've been experimenting with some of the new transistors, and it looks possible to make a portable version of the Abremalin field generator." The Listening Post Bravo terminal entries mention a transistor radio, mentioning, "four weeks stuck in this bunker with only military rations, old magazines and a transistor radio to keep me company." One of Proctor Quinlan's possible responses mentions a "transistor radio" and then states, "doubtful. I wouldn't "miss" a synth any sooner than I'd miss a transistor radio.
 * The Fallout 76 quest The Messenger requires a Memory transistor for completion. The Scoot's shack terminal entries mention a "transistor radio" manufactured by General Atomics International.

Behind the scenes
"This is an argument that I had, many, many times, with people working on 3 and 4, it's like that transistor decision about the world... That rule isn't just about the mechanics of "how do I build like a fusion car without a transistor, or whatever?" What does that say about the cultural priorities of the people who live in that world? So, for instance, one of the things about the setting of Fallout, for me is miniaturization of technology - it's not a priority. Right?" "For us, miniaturizing is really important, but people kind of forget. It's a common thing that people who have just played Fallout lightly don't realize is like, 'Oh yeah, technology stopped in the 50s.' No, actually, technology didn't stop in the 50s, it evolved beyond what we can do right now. And there's a lot of super sci-fi stuff in there, but just the expression of it is different."
 * Around June 2003, a conversation ensued between developer Joshua Sawyer on the Interplay Forums and No Mutants Allowed forums. Sawyer cites examples where transistors and integrated circuits can be found in Fallout.
 * Developer Joel Burgess mentions transitors and world-building in a November 4, 2016 livestream at Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. So transistors are part of the canonical, like it's from Fallout 1, that culture never invented transistors and part of that influences why you see big tube things. The interfaces in Fallout 1 and 2 are engineered in a way that, in a world without transistors, still gets really advanced technology. How is their technology different, by making this one butterfly effect change?''"

The argument I would get into with people is about security cameras. Level designers were building space and put CCTV cameras all around the building and everything like "Ah, this is great." No, no, no, no, no, look, this is somebody's house. Alright, in the world of Fallout, a miniaturized camera - they exist, but it would cost like 15 million dollars. I could go to Best Buy and buy one for 15 or 150 for a whole house setup of miniaturized cameras. But in their world, a camera that's miniaturized to that extent, would be extremely exotic technology that would only be used [in] like a super-high grade military complex or government applications. For somebody's who's coming into that canon and be[ing] like "Ah, I'm gonna make a thing and I've done levels before and I used cam..." and I'm like phbt, no, no, no, no... So you have these rules about the world. And that thing about the cameras, man, I got so tired of that argument because I knew I sound[ed] like a crazy person every time. Right? But it's just this little thing, y'know, and I was like "why [are] aluminum bottles not the primary bottles, it's like an expression of that world..."Z

Leonard Boyarsky (2018)
In January 2018, YouTuber Matt Barton, in a personal interview, chatted with developer Leonard Boyarsky 21 years after releasing the game.

In response to the question about what were the inspirations behind the very unique 1950s sci-fi theme for Fallout and the transition away from a pure Mad Max style, Boyarsky mentioned the following on how he initially starting calling on vacuum tubes for their aesthetic value:]

{{Quotation|We started the game, we're like "Oh, we want to make a Road Warrior-esque Mad Max kind of vizdeo game. So we just started making that game.

I didn't put a lot of thought into it [...] just going to other wo-this is what we're gonna make. And it wasn't until...oh, I don't know six, eight months in, it couldn't have been a year, that this occurred to me, and I don't know why. I've tried to track back and find reasons for why this thing came to me while I was driving home one night. I just thought, "That would be really cool, if it was like this 1950s thing." I think it was a combination of things I've been able to kind of figure out.

I'd recently been reading Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and if you look at that you could see a lot of the basic, raw material for the world, in terms the artistic style of that. And then the other thing was, in retrospect, looking at it, a lot of what we were doing felt very 50s B-movie. The plots, the story we were telling, the fact that we came up with super mutants. It was all very comic-booky, they're all very B-movie. We wanted to feel like, without ever having said this, it seems in hindsight we were all into this. Kind of like, you know, it's very pulpy, it's very B-science-fictiony.

So (and I said this at the talk too) when I came in and said, "This is what we're gonna do.": we really didn't change anything that we'd already done. We, just from that moment forward, started building all this 50s stuff into it. So there's kind of this mix of post-apocalyptic Road Warrior, even the original Alien influence. And then all of a sudden you get all this 1950s stuff and that kind of all combined to make this. And a lot of the things we figured out about it...like the fact that they never went beyond transistors, they stayed with the vacuum tubes: started with me going, "We need a lotta vacuum tubes! Everything would look cooler if it had vacuum tubes on it!"

And Tim's like, "Well, you know if they never did, if they never went over to transistors, this would make it so that you wouldn't be as susceptible to an EMP blast..." I'm like, "Oh that's great!" So, it was really this organic growing of the IP or growing of this kind of idea for what we wanted to do. But if y

In the real world, the field-effect transistor was patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in Canada in 1925, in the United States in 1926 and 1928, and by German inventor Oskar Heil in 1934. A functional point-contact transistor was developed by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs in 1947 and by Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker of Compagnie des Freins et Signaux in 1948. In fact, two of the four patents related to 1947 transistor were rejected by the Patent Office because of the Lilienfeld patents.