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 sig

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.