It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a w

It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a white lab coat" but as a one-line script (with a cryptographic key) to unlock more CPUs which were already installed on the system when it was first shipped.