It is sort of like the anecdote about an early sys-admin who traced down a problem with the new department laser printer locking up for hours to one engineer who had to be told to knock it off when he explained that he was printing nothing, But the printer had, by far, the most powerful CPU in the building so he ported all his simulation programs to postscript and was running them on the printer.
As a one-time uni sysadmin back in the day, our EE lab(s) we had students running Matlab on a Sun E3500 with the display going up on a diskless ~10 year old Sun SparStation 5s that we had lying around (originally from the early 1990s).