About to embark on a playthrough of Fallout

At the risk of losing whatever rpg cred I have, I'm going to admit that I never played around with fallout back in the day. Not sure if it just didn't hit my radar or what.

At any rate, this will be the first time that I seriously sit down and play it. Any recommendations?

I installed the patches and what-not but figured I would hold off on any mods so I could get a more original experience.

While there are no real dump-stats in fallout, for your first playthrough I would recommend having a high Int & Agi. Int gives you more skillpoints when you level up and Agi gves you more action points in combat.
The trait gifted is usually worth picking, even though you will take a large hit to your skill progression.

Swift learner might seem like a nice perk (extra experience), but the bonus is not large enough to make it worth it.

I'd recommend the unofficial patch to clean up a few minor bugs.

I'd also suggest the NPC mod. It's not so much a mod as a patch that simply adds a few small tweaks that make sense.

You're about to play the second best RPG every made (1s being Planescape Torment) I'm sure that you will enjoy it Did you every play Fallout 2?

I've played 1 and 2 for a very brief period of time. Not sure why I didn't continue playing either one (memory is a bit hazy) but so far the first one seems great. I was really jonesing for something old school. Unfortunately many of the games I remember with great fondness are difficult to get into now. How did we ever navigate those old interfaces for hours upon hours?

Heck, I remember spending quite a bit of time just tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get optimal performance. Command line interfaces were just fine then. I suppose we've just become spoiled.

Fallout's interface OTOH is nice and "wieldy"