How long would it take to create a Windows 1.0 capable machine from scratch?

You forgot the "create the universe" step.

That's basically what the top answer says, but it's still an interesting question. Especially since it shows people how interrelated different aspects of the economy are to each other.

I agree. If you have ever read the book Crystal Fire, about the work done at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950-70s, it took the best and brightest decades to solve the chemistry and engineering challenges present in building transistors and ICs. Even with 20 skilled PHDs as a starting point, I don't think you could overcome the practical manufacturing challenges in any reasonable amount of time.

A maximum extend to which you can get with "sticks and stones" is about level of seventies in IC technology, which effectively mean it is useless for the purpose.

At that point, the "you have to build manufacturing machinery to build more manufacturing machinery" gets close to being exponential, and you will spend double the time just to get past the critical mass of IC controlled machinery to do something that looks like a nineties era fab complex.

First ASML steppers required close to no complex parts: nearly fully analog/mechanical they were. The last gen ones however require megatons of electronics, and manufacturing facilities the size of football stadium for nearly every complex part.

Are you disregarding the hypothetical assumptions of the question? Particularly that the people would not tire, age, or die, and already have all required knowledge.

Or, is your argument that the tasks involved in building an 8086-level computer and prerequisites are not serializable?

I'd disagree -- but I think an important question is whether the goal is to create an industrial base that can make a chip with similar methods to the 1980s at scale, or whether they just need to create a single chip as the culmination of all their work. It also depends on how slow you're willing to go -- with enough RAM, you could emulate the 8086 on something like a 4004 at a slower but still usable speed. (C.f. ARM Linux running on an 8-bit micro[1]) If it's a single chip, they can do things that don't scale. Using a simpler processor increases yield dramatically, making it easier for them to get a working processor later. Corrosion might be a problem if they take a long time to build things, but they can use gold wiring for everything despite the cost. If you imagine them as monk-scribes, I think a story could be made of them practicing and honing their craft 12 hours a day until they can hand-etch circuits using a microscope and mechanical tools to downscale each movement they make (Sidestepping the UV source for photlithography). The RAM requirements can be lowered by micro-weaving readonly data with rope-core memory in a tiny package. Humans are surprisingly good at fine and accurate work. This would be an illuminated Bible or sand art, but at an unprecedented scale. The biggest hurdle, I think, is the energy required for getting chemicals at high purities and performing vapor deposition. Maybe they could harness hydro power to generate electricity? Maybe they can burn coal or charcoal for heat? The wear on such a system might be too much to keep up with for them.

[1]: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

One of the points everyone ignores is agriculture.

If you're going to have a bunch of humans in a small area (civilization), it's going to be a requirement. Until you have mechanized/highly productive agriculture, more than half of your population's job will be food production.

You dont need optics to make semiconductors. You can make transistors in your garage without microscope.

Thanks for the laugh :)

ICs need very difficult to handle chemicals like hydrofluroric acid to manufacture though. That kind of stuff will never be DIY.

It takes one DIYer about 2-3 months to build CPU from scratch today. BMOW, Gigatron, Magic, a handful of 74 series TTL chips and some dedication is all you need.

There will be so much stuff left over from our civilization that it should be pretty easy to scrounge and scrape together stuff, Mad Max-style. Access to a landfill, steel, copper, other metals and some working electric motors/generators, and you're off and running. Heck, to make a generator all you need is a permanent magnet, some copper wire, and some mechanical energy, like maybe hydro or a bike crank.

I’d say rendering screens could be epochal

Develop mentat skills.

One of my favorite series! Grab your grail!

Wikipedia doesn't contain nearly enough knowledge. It tells you what a CPU is, not how to build one. It tells you some of the chemical properties of certain common chemicals, but not the millions of reactions, or thousands of entries in databases giving their exact physical and chemical properties, etc. Wikipedia would be a useful tool for bootstrapping, but is clearly a tiny, tiny fraction of human knowledge. It's short on a lot of technical details which fill the shelves and databases scientists, engineers, etc. depend on. It's also missing the living knowledge, that is passed from generation to generation as we teach people how to do the thousands of jobs that are necessary to keep modern society running.

I would say the most useful thing when we get close to it is a general purpose robot capable of jumpstarting civilization.

We need a few of those in bunkers around the solar system.

It's very plausible. Most answers are concerned with the technical side, but the real difficulty is achieving a stable society with a continued interest in science and research. Organized civilizations have existed for millennia but war, religious zealotry and social uprisings have been resetting scientific advances every so often.

The unknown Greek engineer who built/programmed the Antikythera Mechanism in the 2nd century BC could have worked with Babbage in his 19th century Difference Engine. Add the steam-powered Aeolipile of 1st century AD and the basic technical ingredients for the industrial revolution were already present in classical Greece. However, the proper social factors that allowed the exponential growth in science and research that resulted in the development of microelectronics and the information society are extremely difficult to achieve, more so than the merely technical ones.

The use of ASCII '\n' to move the the start of the next line in UNIXes is merely a historical accident. There were plenty of other operating systems, some of which predate UNIX itself, which used other encodings: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations_in_dif...

Nah, fuck 8 bit code pages in general.

have it use Unicode line endings (or, if Unicode has to be recreated, do IT right, and have it use 28 bits for codepoints and 2 bits describing the format).