No doubt these were instruments part of some scheme to make a living, and the context in which they were used is no longer available.
I love to see how names of famous Romans and Greeks were reused to give them credence. I bet they used lots of other techniques listed by Cialdini in Influence.
The Prodigy PC client runs in Dosbox, it's how we do most of our testing. If we, or someone, can get dosbox working in a browser then it's possible. But when it's displayed at vintage computer festivals period-appropriate hardware is used.