Kudos for bringing back to life dead electronics. This is an example for the world. Hold on - back in 1996 the world was still spinning and doing business with simpler devices. So many uses that these can be put to. No matter whether selling or donating, that’s not the point here really.
This whole story points to one obvious yet very conveniently ignored fact about free software and their UIs in particular - implemented is whatever is convenient to be written and whatever the author thought would be okay, and not to the user... because, well, because it comes without any warranty and this is a great excuse to deliver only what oneself (the primary dev) needs and not what the potential users would need.
Occasionally the two (needs) overlap and then great piece of feee software is born...
And because there is no warranty and typically the top devs are also (sorry) somewhat narcissistic - they would seldom enquire end users about the perceived usability of UIs.
Take arbitrary open source appliance targeted at end-users and you can easily argue that it’s somewhat broken from usability pont of view.