yea that is too beefy and crusty for lasers.
It looks like a add-on tool for a lathe or milling machine that came in project catalogs back in the old days.
check out mrpete222 on youtube, he is a youtube machine shop teacher that goes into some details about these kinds of attachments, their design goals, drawbacks, etc, and he actually does some comparison. the idea was that you can make your machine do crazy stuff with attachments but it won't be very accurate. But he does have like 1000 videos so you might need to look, I have seen something similar for a atlas lathe.
The problem with this thing is that it is not very stiff, so unless you are doing light work it will vibrate and bend and cause errors. I have a feeling that it would work pretty good so long you are not trying to make precision mechanical devices. I think it would work on a drill press for making holes at weird angles in a repeatable way without a jig.
The big degree indicator bands are potentially a sign of good quality though.
nevermind its just dirty, it has no indicators as far as I can tell.