Lapis the Nevrean

At least a year or something. If you want to build a time capsule from a certain year, it makes it difficult to determine if you've collected parts that were all contemporary to each other.

Sometimes you get lucky with something like a laptop that has a year in the modem information sticker. Frequently you have to cross reference date ranges from Wikipedia, or look at old manufacturer websites in The Wayback Machine, or find old computer magazines that announce your part as an upcoming product or review it as a new arrival. Sometimes the best you can do without sinking an abnormal amount of time is "it was available for sale that year". Might have been the last year it was for sale and everyone was using something else by then, hard to tell sometimes!

Worse, some parts have become very hard to find over the years, and people will charge you nearly new price for a beat-up example, because where else are you gonna get it?

The never-ending forward march of time is relentless and can be depressing at times. And this is just a single hobby where I have some domain knowledge. This definitely happens to other, more significant historical artefacts. Gone forever because they weren't worth anything at the time, something you only see in a museum from behind glass, if that.