Quote:
Originally posted by TIO
You also give a lot of credit to the scientist and the computer engineer. Even they would know very, very little about the inner workings of a computer; to us, most processors are still magic black boxes. Those who know how the black boxes still don't know everything you'd need to make a computer. Besides, you'd have to go through the industrial revolution again before you could make anything that even looks like a computer. Even if all the infrastructure remained, nobody would be able to operate the vast majority of it until it was well and truly decrepit.
I wouldn't mind having someone, though, who knew the inner workings of the atom, and could explain physics from Galileo to Einstein and beyond. That kind of knowledge is much harder to come up with than microprocessor design, and it would be pretty nice not to have to discover it all again.
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My primary concern was that knowledge not be lost - not necessarily the specific knowledge of how to build a computer, but knowledge in general. Calculus. Quantum Physics. Astronomy. Chemistry. Assuming it is possible to rebuild civilization from 10 people (a dangerous assumption, I know), having this knowledge intact would be a great boon for future generations.
The last few lines of your paragraph are exactly what I was thinking.