Similar experience in the 90s, but we don't really know the intricacies of doping silicone, or smelting metal to make the pins. And what about mining it?

I think the last time people knew how things were made was in preindustrial societies because they had to build everything themselves (whatever little things they had)

I was once in a museum in Bolzano, Italy. And they had the ice man mummy there (we call him Ötzi). He died like 5000years ago. And his "axe" was made of copper from some mine very far away. So even this guy probably did not know how everything he had was made. There is a theory that he was probably very rich. So maybe less rich people were more in touch with what they owned. But still I found it fascinating that even so far back people relied on technology and materials that they didn't really know about.

I partially disagree. I know the basic high level concept of all those. Would I be able to reproduce state of the art results on my own? Obviously not.

But a core part of the engineer or scientist mindset is curiosity for the sake of curiosity. Just the fact that I don't know something is enough reason for me to poke at it or otherwise learn more. Same reason I still take apart broken electronics as an adult and try to find the fault (and sometimes even repair it).

By the way, mining silicon is particularly easy: it's basically sand. The difficult part is purifying it, especially to the levels needed for modern nm scale chips.

A more useful question than making high end silicon would be: could you with reasonable tooling reproduce basic electric components? I'm talking things like light bulbs, resistors, generators, perhaps capacitors even? Just the basics crappy versions, not modern highly optimised surface mount components. And I think the anwer is yes (for me personally) if I had access to metal wire and sheet stock and industrial revolution era tools.