I've often wondered how long it would take us to rebuild computers from scratch, in case of a world catastrophe (nuclear war, zombie invasion...). Of course, we

I've often wondered how long it would take us to rebuild computers from scratch, in case of a world catastrophe (nuclear war, zombie invasion...). Of course, we would have other, more urgent needs (food, shelter, healthcare...), but it's an interesting thought experiment. I use a computer every day, but I wouldn't know where to start to rebuild one from scratch. There are books like "Linux from scratch", but it is far from enough: we would need to "re-invent" electricity, silicon, assembly languages, operating systems... With the division of labour, nobody has the knowledge to build all this. I think it would take centuries to re-create what we have now. The cool thing is, we wouldn't need to care about backward compatibility / legacy apps, and we could skip C++ and immediately standardize on Lisp ;)