I'm Gen X, which means that we were, as a group, routinely traumatized as kids with killer bees, acid rain, a frank exchange of nuclear warheads ... suddenly sex was death and we weren't sure of the parameters. But the nukes were always in the background and when you review the media of the period it was like seeing the same guy in the background of different movies, always looking at the camera.
I had read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, really the prototype of this kind of thing, about a limited nuclear event and what would happen. There's a great bit:
On the ninth day after The Day, Lavinia McGovern died. This, too, had been inevitable ever since the lights went out and the refrigeration ceased. Since Lavinia McGovern suffered from diabetes, insulin had kept her alive. Without refrigeration, insulin deteriorated rapidly. Not only Lavinia, but all diabetics in Fort Repose, dependent on insulin, died at about the same period as the drug lost its potency.
Now, insulin is much more shelf-stable, but you get the idea. I was struck. So imagine a tween who had drawn up lists of "who had what," where we were going to meet, and general plans for your limited nuclear war. I did have the relatively bright idea of trekking to this particularly cold and hidden spring as a kind of natural refrigerator for wrapped food and batteries and the like. All of that eventually faded after the Berlin Wall came down.
I still think about it, from time to time, as "What would I be good for besides slave labor?" They made us get pretty handy with electronics for my degree and the rest of my sciences were well-rounded with chemistry and some very basic civil engineering. I ran amok in TechShop before they folded, so the shop stuff I can get by with to some degree.
In terms of computing's value, I think the two biggest areas of overlooked utility would be packet radio for a low-bandwidth internet, and having the foresight to have offline copies of Wikipedia, scans of the Gingery books, and so forth, connected up to a PC with line conditioned solar power. With dozens of the same PC or laptop, because those parts wear out. Otherwise, yes, IT probably won't be a big part of your average scavenger horde hellbent on reenacting parts of The Road Warrior.