Is there anyone who has worked during the past, say, 10 years with an operating system where Perl was not available?

I have. Several years ago (but less than 10 ;-)), I worked at a company had developed its own OS in the early 70s, and is still using it today. Noone has ever ported Perl to it. I've also worked with Linux systems where the resources were constraint in such a way (16M disk, 4M RAM, 1.6M OS-image) that fitting in Perl wasn't possible.