Hi All, I'm an academic in the field of computer science. My colleagues and I have recently started asking, in very non-academic terms, what would happen to our field (and the internet) if there were to be a generalized collapse of the society that our tools and systems were built in. So aide my reasoning, I'm hoping that you all can explain how this happened during the biggest fall in the west, Rome's decline into the middle ages.
What are some examples of technology that were lost during the decline of Western Rome, and why did those technologies, in particular, fade away?
Are there any works I should know about dealing with technology loss during a societal decline?
My intuition is that technologies are lost when they are no longer relevant to the new situation (and this is seen in computer science broadly, see the number of COBOL programmers in the world) but I'm a layperson and could be wildly off base.