Computers in cockpits....
As a thought experiment I started looking at the data available to the computers that inform the pilot (and autopilot system component) with information about the plane's position, velocity, acceleration, orientation, rate of orientation change, and the rate at which the orientation rate is changing in three dimensional space.
They have GPS.
They have at least one very good ring gyro system and perhaps several more prosaic inertial reference units.
They have pitot tubes.
They have air pressure sensors for altitude.
They have AoA sensors.
And I'm tired enough just now I am probably forgetting something. Modern computational techniques (Kalman filters) can take all these inputs, known data about their goodness for measuring the data about the qualities for various aspects of their data. GPS measures the position (and time) the plane had in three dimensional space at some point in time relatively recent depending on the time scale involved, closer to milliseconds than seconds. It says nothing about velocity without considering the differences of at least two readings and ideally a string of readings for averaging. Accelerometers are good with the rate of change for the plane's three dimensional velocity. And so forth.
Presume some information is lost. That Kalman filter can adjust its parameters to reject or at least partially disregard data that is not present. This degrades the solution; but, you still have a pretty darned good idea of what the plane is doing.
Take the data and work back to extract more data, specifically wind speeds acting on the plane in three dimensions. (An AoA vane on the top of the plane might be handy for deriving a cross-wind data independent of calculated guesswork, by the way.)
Now we step off the cliff. What is the largest wind speed change a plane in normal (non-hurricane) conditions likely to encounter translated to a change in airspeed as measured and corrected? Is it 60kts, 75kts, what? This number gives you a wind velocity change range in which to look for a solution. The plane is without airspeed indication it is willing to accept. But it still knows its orientation and inertial velocity with cross checks from GPS. If flying pitch and power is sufficient to keep the plane flying I suspect AoA and power is even better. The plane knows the AoA. It knows the power. It knows attitude. It knows position. It can work backwards from the pitch/power figures to figure out what airspeed, actually what air velocity set, could have the plane moving the way it is with the pitch and power settings it also knows. It calculates a substitute airspeed of quite remarkable accuracy. (I'd then judiciously feed this back into the Kalman filter for a quality check on pitot readings.)
Presuming no CPU cycle limitations there is no reason for the plane's computers to decouple from most of the automation control of the plane. In fact I am willing to assert that the plane could actually have continued on to Paris and even landed on the mark under computer control with aggressive enough software.
At the very least that suggests even a modest '386 class machine should have been able to guess airspeed well enough to be able to issue a quite adequate stall warning at all times.
I am somewhat bemused by the APPARENT fact that the flight displays only relied on a very small subset of the sensors available. I'm sitting here idly wondering why these computers did not make use of the full suite of adequately accurate instrumentation available on the plane.
(And I suspect I ignited a stink bomb with this observation here among a batch of pilots, mostly good ones at that.)