Indeed. A lady at a bar in Portland once inquired what I thought humanity’s most advanced technological achievement was, after a slight pause I said the modern microprocessor. She laughed in my face at the suggestion. But when I pressed her for an answer of her own, she refueled to say, instead would only insist that my answer was ridiculous. Odd lady.

Haha. I suppose it would be: language. Without it, nothing else is possible.

Sure! Another way you might take it is that the pointy stick is the most advanced: it started out before language, and has had considerably more effort put into modernization.

What’s weird is asking the question and just nope-ing out of the resulting conversation.

I suppose when you answered with a "digital technology" they could have realized you weren't the right person for them. Now that I think about it, it's a great filtering conversation for a date.

Perhaps decades. Perhaps thousands of years. It probably depends upon why those machines were destroyed. Look at World War II. European nations and Japan rebuilt relatively rapidly then rapidly built upon progress made during the war. On the other hand, we have the decline of the Roman Empire. While we may now acknowledge that the dark ages weren't as dark as our 19th century peers thought, the western world lost the will or the imagination to rebuild at large scales (which the semiconductor industry certainly is).