Elias wasn't a pirate by trade; he was a preservationist. His doctoral thesis relied on a hyper-specific set of scripts written over a decade ago—scripts that refused to compile on modern, bloated versions of the software. To save years of work, he needed the exact environment of 2012, but his original license key had long since expired into the ether of defunct corporate servers.
I have a valid academic license that includes older versions. When trying to install MATLAB R2012b on Windows 10, I get error “Failed to create desktop shortcut” and the installer hangs. download fixed matlab 2012