And sometimes, that’s portable enough.

The Command Window works. You can plot a sine wave. You can run a Simulink model. For about 45 minutes, you feel like a wizard.

A true portable application runs entirely from a USB stick or an external drive. It leaves no trace on the host machine. MATLAB, by its very nature, refuses this ghost-like existence. And yet, the legend persists because of a clever, semi-functional workaround that has circulated on engineering forums since the early 2010s. It goes by the name: The MATLAB "Deployment" Method.