Can you imagine computer science if we had no prior knowledge of computers and had to research the entire process starting at the end point? What a task.
Not quite. A huge group of someones in aggregate understood what is going on. There is still no single expert who designed the system originally. Eventually, or perhaps already in many cases, some portion of the system has no living expert who designed it.
I can imagine a future where expertise on some deep components of the system has been lost to the sands of time, and people have to study them blindly to determine their function in just the same way that we currently study nature.
Neat.
edit: I think raelshark and Carl Sagan said it better than I did.
In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.
Hell, we are inventing entire languages today that compile to Javascript, which in turn is interpreted or JIT-compiled by other tools. Or we write advanced HTML5 frontends that talk to advanced Node.js backends that in turn talk to legacy systems written in COBOL running on IBM mainframes. Programmer-archaeologists already exist.
I guess the other interesting events are first Fission (weapon or test), and when we first land on Mars.
-Carl Sagan
No one, nowhere fully understands how technology like a computer works. That's because it's possible to design systems on top of systems without fully understanding the nuances of all the dependencies.
I never meant to imply that one person understood the whole technology system (that's truly absurd), rather that each individual component was designed and implemented intentionally and it's likely that each niche in the industry had at least one person who truly understood it.
Now, take that paradigm and compare it to natural science: No one anywhere ever had any understanding of the system, and now we look at the end result of a constantly changing system and try to ascertain everything from how it works today to how it all began.
I apologize, I could have been more clear in my original post, sorry!