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Originally Posted by Legbreaker
That's pretty much the point I was trying to make too. Just because EMP doesn't fry a circuit board doesn't mean something else didn't damage or destroy it. A hungry mob with a box of matches can do just as much damage as a small nuke to infrastructure. A band of crazy anti-technology nuts going to town with hammers doesn't do a lot of good to a computer system either.
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Yeah; also there's issues of maintenance. The MTBF on computer parts can be years...or minutes. I've gotten ten PCs from a vendor before and had to send back two or three due to undiagnosable hardware-level failures, despite every last one of them being identical and all passed the vendor's QA. A T2k-level disaster would exacerbate that a hundred or thousand-fold.
Still, I think bigger cities that were unaffected will have a few computers running - some more robust IBM 5150s (the original "IBM PC") slaved to a PDP-11/75 or other mainframe just to manage things as I'd mentioned.
However, another HUGE factor is the personnel. You have a die-off of some older IBM engineers and there's a LOT of companies using S390s for various tasks who will literally be absolutely stuck. The "undocumented features/issues" of the IBM systems I've used in the past would fill volumes. However, the "old IBM guys" knew what the work-arounds were. Now take their experience and expertise out of the picture. So we get a data-center's generator working again, on Alcohol, establish a reliable enough fuel supply, get people in who can work the local PCs as terminals, and fire back up our hospital or bank mainframe and...suddenly an issue arises that hours or even days of studying the manufacturer's manuals and prior event documentation do not even come close to fixing. That 60 year old guy on his second pacemaker and circling the drain waiting for retirement? Yeah he died from the flu, and he was the only one who knew the correct order in which to IPL the segments so the system would run for more than ten minutes without abending...
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Again, my point exactly. Even if only a few cables are cut, service is GONE. You only have to look at real life for examples - a storm wipes out a bridge taking the cables with it, a lightning strike burns out an electricity substation, a heavy snowfall brings down power lines and their supporting towers (as happened a few years back in Canada I think) and so on, and so on, and so on. Twilight is all those disasters and more on a global scale.
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For the "average person" wanting phone or computer connectivity beyond local, yeah, they're hosed. Fortunately the massive redundancies of the internet will absorb a lot of that. It'll be a lot slower though, rest assured.
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Yep, another point often forgotten in the search for "realism". It's just a game. Some of the background doesn't fit with reality, some of it is less than reality, some of it more.
Does a movie or television show have to be perfectly in line with reality to be enjoyable? Of course not, otherwise none of the James Bond movies for example would ever have seen the light of the cinema screen. Twilight is the same concept - near enough to be believable.
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Depends on the situation. The joy of "do what thou wilt" as a GM is that we can fix things we don't like, and others can just revel in canon as they like - either are acceptable, depending on what the group wants. There's enough stuff in T2k that as an individual gamer I wouldn't use that it's far from what most here would consider canon, but I still consider it fun. However, I'd play in a canon game in a heartbeat. It's all what you want out of the game. I find a lot of the canon a little too depressing so I do it differently, but I appreciate that others don't, and that includes issues with computers and technology. So ultimately I think we're all on the same sheet of music even if we're singing in different keys
