Even now you can pretty much fire up any Unix workstation from the 90’s and, through the magic of X, work away with the beautiful design while your modern 100% style-free generic PC does the heavy lifting.
This was invaluable to me, because otherwise I'd have had to fork out money I didn't have for MATLAB and the like - or sit in the lab all day, like everyone else.
Months later, after I left, I visited the floor as a consultant and pretty much every engineer and sysadmin had one on their desks.