I remember when I worked in an electronics lab one of our EEs built several "dongle buses", a parallel port "bus" that you could plug up to about half a dozen dongles in, and it was frequently fully populated on the machines we used for CAD and PCB layout. An early version of PADS (PADS2000?) was one of the applications we used.

>they broke all the time

While I was reading the OP I kept thinking about how an accounting firm's entire ability to do business rested on the continued functioning of a parallel-port dongle. I just have to imagine that they had a box full of these.

We had proper licenses for all PADS seats at my previous work, but all the users always installed the cracked versions because it was unusable with the dongle.