Just to use your example, you could dust off a 200 year old microscope and it’d be perfectly fine. If there’s a cracked lens, that’s an easy fix without any significant expertise.
Same with any old blacksmithing tools and so on. They’ll look old, but generally retain their functionality and a novice can repair them.
Old electronics require expert knowledge and specifically manufactured parts to fix. Knowledge of old electronics dies each year and the parts go away. A person who’s never heard of a Vectrex or see one in action would have no idea what it does. Even if they recognize that it has a screen, they wouldn’t be aware that it renders vectors and not pixels like nearly every other screen. Another 1000 years removed from the computing standards of today, people might not even be able to imagine what a typical desktop computer does when they look at it. But they’ll see tools from 885 and generally be able to guess what they’re for.
High tech things are very abstracted tools that are just going to look like useless boxes to future people. Most won’t know or care what they did. It’s weird to think about. Advances will also be lost with time without us realizing it. Vector screens are truly impressive, but people don’t know they exist. Will we someday get monochrome retinal implants and they’re convenient enough that people give up on traditional computer screens, and someday humanity forgets we all used to have full color displays with sound in our pockets? Who knows.
I’ve never seen a Vectrex, but having seen other vector displays on old arcade machines, it’s truly mind blowing.
The warm glow of those smooth beams has no modern equivalent in consumer hardware. Despite technically being old technology, and some machines being over 4 decades old, it can still blow young minds seeing a way of rendering so different from what we accept as the norm today and how it’s in many aspects even more advanced than modern screens.
Knowing it’s something that’s gradually being lost with time is pretty sad. Previous human technology advancements would often be lost in a hole and still be recognizable for what they were centuries later when they were dug up. It’s kind of strange that the tech we make since the computer revolution basically dies along with their creators and maintainers and basically just turn into future door stoppers.
Or it’s like driving a reliable Toyota with a proven safety record vs not wanting to pay for some new vehicle with a seatbelt subscription and updates that brick your car randomly or blare ads at max volume while driving down the interstate.
I’ve lost more work to forced updates resetting my computer randomly and making operation less stable than I ever have to malware (the latter being never in my adult life).
Office is so bad that it’s unbearable. Photoshop became subscription-only and now I’m stuck with spyware that auto-launches and runs in the background in over 2 dozen separate processes and more bugs and glitches than I ever had on paid versions before.
Meanwhile, Sublime Text and Procreate hold up and I’m not paying monthly.