Yeah technically you could telnet in or do a remote X11, but you'd have to telnet to one of the machines in the lab, that someone was working on. So their processes would get priority since they were on the console, and sometimes people were asses and would boot you out so they could compile faster.

Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.