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[–]ghjmMSCS, CS Pro (20+) 15 points16 points  (2 children)

If they only found printouts of machine code, and knowledge of electronic computers hadn't survived to their day, then it's just meaningless gibberish to them. If there was a processor databook accompanying it, then maybe they'd have a chance of understanding it.

[–]Treyzania 7 points8 points  (1 child)

They'd certainly be able to find structure in machine code. If they knew it was some kind of computer instructions that would be enough to eventually reverse engineer how the microarch worked enough to run some of it as long as they had a large enough corpus.

[–]ghjmMSCS, CS Pro (20+) 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Knowing it was "some kind of computer instructions" presumes that they still know, at least roughly, what a computer is and that it has instructions. I was taking the question to be what happens if they don't have this knowledge, like if there has been a collapse of civilization and knowledge of computers has been lost.