I do lab planning for a living and sometimes I like to play "How Many Houses Could This Instrument Buy?" with my coworkers. Usually it's something along the lines of 0.1 to 1 houses, but every once in a while we do a process development lab for some biotech firm, and they want to spring for one of those Satorious automated bioreactors. Those things cost "a whole block's worth of nice houses in a mid-major metro" money.
A highschool lens-and-prism set is like 30-40 bucks on aliexpress, including a triple laserpointer. Not quite an optics table, but I'm assuming you don't do your tabletop gaming with orange goggles and/or actual half-molten minis?
That's how we in IT treat those. Now please budget to replace them when its software only uses an EOL operating system. We don't like windows xp running something 'critical' to the business.
If not, the only functional difference you get for upgrading is exchanging the floppy drive for a usb port.
It's really hard to convince people to replace a 6+ digit piece of machinery all because its control system has an EOL OS. Especially considering upgrading it to the newest model most likely means upgrading the OS from Windows 95 to Windows XP (embedded).
If it was Linux that had open-source software that could be updated independently by forking it, then this EOL BS would never be a thing, but nope, proprietary stuff gets execs get hard as rocks
When I first started in the gc area of my previous lab I was in charge of training the interns in the other areas of the lab, but I'd give an impromptu tour of the gc/gcms/gcmsms area of the lab, I'd explain the gc as "the magical science gnomes work in this box, we bring a technician in here once a year to make sure they're fed and given fresh water", and had no idea how to explain an ms let alone an msms/triplequadrapole. By the end I could hand wave away the gc (along with do the yearly maintenance), I do a pretty good job at explaining the ms without relying too much on the term "magic" (but it totally is) and the msms? That shit is so close to magical that I think it always will be explained with some use of "magic". I understand the theory behind it, but how the hell does it do what it does??