25 years ago autotools, and their predecessor the Cygnus tools, were a breath of fresh air. Porting stuff was a nightmare (imake, mkmk, many hand-rolled Makefiles that only supported the author's own system) and autotools made it easy, especially if you were running a non-homogeneous collection of Unix and Unix-like systems, including both libc5 and libc6 variants of Linux.
I was living through that era with a zoo of Unix variants to build for (including, but not limited to, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIS, Tru64 and various Linux flavours) - and I always was excited about stuff that did just have hand rolled Makefiles, as that was something that was way easier to fix as the average software using autotools.
