Someone who is eager and creative like that is unlikely to be a sociopathic jobsworth. I.e. the type most likely to steal secretes or undermine your business.
Paying Sun whatever stupid amount of money they wanted didn’t seem to make sense, GNU still didn’t have their own domain, and for whatever reason I couldn’t find a gcc binary for Solaris to download (probably related to the terrible state of web search engines at the time). So I visited my university sysadmin and copied gcc from his Solaris network to use to compile our own fresh copy.
It’s sometimes hard to remember just how bad things used to be.
Downloading them over my 28.8kbps modem was so expensive and tedious and unreliable that I put my PC in the car, along with a stack of floppies and the 15" CRT monitor, mouse, and IBM Model M keyboard, drove six hours to the opposite side of the country, to where my friend who ran the BBS lived.
We spent the weekend copying floppies and installing very early Slackware on a couple of machines.
Still... had to load the tape on our office AIX machine (the only Unix box I had access to), then wire up a null modem cable to a PC, install Kermit on both ends, transfer all the floppy images, find an MS-DOS image writer, and finally copy the works on that stack of floppies.
Good times, sort of :)