...when, back in the days when I was a UNIX neophyte, I was trying to install Perl 4 on SunOS 4.1, after I'd nagged the admins at Uni about it for approximately a fortnight. They gave me an account with sufficient disk quota and internet access, and I downloaded the tarball and unpacked it.
There was a configure script of sorts, but it was pretty manual - wanting to know the word size of int, long, double, unsigned int, unsigned long, unsigned double, etc etc.
Ah, them were t'days. This was 1991.
First thing I wrote (after spending a week or so just getting the thing to compile) was the official World's Worst Implementation Of Killall.