Thomas Aquinas was my first D&D character, built from the original AD&D PHB (which I still have).  I rolled his stats by rolling the d6 three times and writing down the number, and then repeat 35 more times.  Every six sets, I wrote down the best and it was the stat for that category; first Strength, then Intelligence, then Wisdom, then Constitution, then Dexterity and then finally Charisma.  I believe his stats were ...  Str 15, Int 16, Wis 18, Con 10, Dex 12, Cha 10.  Well, right away I could see that he was going to be a Cleric because he had an 18 wisdom.  So I began to read the character class and race limits over and over.  I decided he would be a Multi-class Half-Elf: Cleric Fighter Magic User.  My DM (brother) let me have 8hp since the HP dice were a d10, d8 and a d4, he let me have the max of the 'middle' die.  So I was off and running on my new career as an adventurer.

He had bought and read Keep on the Borderlands, so that is what we played.  I remember knowing almost nothing about the game.  I went into the town and was told, I should go to the Inn/Tavern.  So I went.  I went in and folks of all sorts were talking among themselves, and the barkeep asked if I wanted something to drink.  I asked how much and decided on a tankard of ale.  Then I heard "rumors" off the table which my brother rolled up and then read to me.  I think I got 4 rumors.  They were equally likely to be true or false, but I didn't know this.  I hired a party and we went out the next morning.  I had a longsword, plate mail armor, a shield (which gave me an AC of 2), a dagger, a backpack, a holy symbol, a flask of holy water, three flasks of lamp oil, torches, rations, a cloak, and a lot of enthusiasm to slay some zombies or something.

I remember I went due north from the starting hex or square, I think it was a hex, because hex paper was so wild back then.  After two days travel I stumbled into a cave that was his homebrew starter dungeon.  It was ten feet wide and went straight for a while.  There were traps and mold and stuff.  I think my first combat encounter was a gelatinous cube.  I burned that baby to the ground.  I got almost no treasure.  We went further and I fought a band of ten-ish somethings, maybe skeletons.  I managed to get through that fight without anyone being killed, but a few party members were badly wounded.  We went and had a rest (long rest, overnight like) and everyone who was wounded regained 1d6 HP, IIRC.  So still fairly beat up, we kept on going with the most wounded folks in the middle of the group for their protection.  We were hassled by as many 'wandering monsters' as we faced 'scripted encounters.'  In the end, we found a pile of copper pieces and a magic +1 sword.  Getting the copper pieces back to town was the challenge.  I devised a plan to take a big pile of them out and bury them.  As much as we could carry, we trucked back to the town.  Things got busy, and we stopped playing.

Back in those days, my brother tried to keep me from reading the DMG.  There was a statement in the DMG admonishing DMs to keep the DMG out of the hands of players.

New characters were little more than commoners with a weapon proficiency bonus, and if you were lucky enough to multi-class, maybe you also had a spell.  Today's characters (in 5e) begin more powerful than a level 2 character back then (except for HP), and they race up quickly from there.  The only characters I ever played over first level, started at that other level.  But we had just as much fun sneaking through dungeon corridors and hoping to roll well on initiative.  THACO was cumbersome but it was all we had.  I also remember being so paranoid of traps that I would throw a 100' coil of rope ahead on the corridor; then tap the walls, ceiling and floor with my 10' pole and walk carefully forward watching, listening and smelling for anything.  Now we pretty much walk through the dungeon as we would walk down the corridor at school.

I started playing back in 79/80 with a dm using one of the booklet sets then transitioned to AD&D and have never really stopped. Been times when I couldn’t find a game, but I created homebrew and tested it using various of my characters.  I learned to DM back then and still do occasionally. That led to the guy in my sig down there. Too much rules lawyering got me tossed into the game to kill me off but I managed to survive and thrive. Most of my early characters are still around as NPCs in my homebrew as they all made epic levels by the end of 3.5. Someone was talking about Grue back on page 1, my friend had his cousin - Bodarf str 18+, int 6- and over time we saw many of his brothers and cousins all with similar stats. We had fun playing Gygax’s Looney Tunes module - watch out for granny’s umbrella 😳🤪. Helped run a couple of small gaming conventions back then. Most of my earliest characters were elves and multiclasses. I play 5e now with a group of adults (well they are kids to me but at least they are all over 25). When 15 year olds complain about my play (not often)  I just tell them that that is how you do it if if your OG 😳😁.

Okay. Story time. So, I was introduced to D&D by a friend of mine in middle school back in 1981. It was hard to form a group back then because of the Satanic Panic. Oh, and because there was no internet, no cellphones, we had school, and our primary mode of transportation was a Huffy. But a few of us nerds managed to form a little group to play at one friend's house after school each Friday. One friend of ours wanted to play, but his family was like really super hardcore Irish Catholic. Like, old school Massachusetts Irish Catholic. The kind that goes to church three times a week and eats dinner in their nice clothes every night. So of course his parents wouldn't let him play. 

So we had to devise a strategy. We poured over the boxed set, PHB, the DMG, the MM, and the modules we had, looking for the right images. We found lots of examples of heroes fighting nasty monsters, but finally we found one image that was perfect! It was one of those simple line drawings of a fighter-type in armor fighting some nasty monster, and on his shield was . . . a cross! Not a proper cross, but close enough. So he spent weeks preparing a presentation for his parents, to show them that this game was not about "the occult" or worshiping Satan or anything like that. On the contrary, he used the games materials to show his parents that the game was about playing heroes who fought against those very things. He said that when he showed his parents the picture of the guy with the cross on his shield, they were silent for a good minute. 

It took several months of convincing. They even took him to church and sat him down with the priest to discuss it. But finally they relented. On three conditions:

1. He was not allowed to kill. 

2. His character had to carry a shield with a cross on it. 

3. He had to tell them what happened in each game session as soon as he got home. 

So he got to play, and our group gained a cleric. Win win! 

It all started with the Sheffield University Science Fiction Society. We went to Travelling Man to restock our library with a bunch of S.U. money. There we stumbled across, and bought, a D&D scenario called Tegil Manor. We had no idea what it was but it seemed intriguing. All those monster statistics.

We managed to get a Player's handbook, and tried to work out how to play based on that and the scenario. We got almost everything wrong, of course, but we had a lot of fun. The Science Fiction society became the Dungeons & Dragons society and then the "Not Only Dungeons and Dragons Society." (as Runequest enthusiasts made themselves felt) Eventually people who knew what they were doing joined. We finally got our hands on the other two books.

That would have been late '70s.