I was looking back at the development logs for minecraft and I realised that I have been playing for quite a while, and I was wondering when everyone else started playing.
Personally I started in early september of '10, a few days before the seecret friday 9 update, that added compasses. (or so i think, I know i had started playing before the next update, which added fishing poles) Tamugetsu and i had decided we wanted to try out the game, and since he was the one with the ability to buy stuff online, he bought the account and we both played on it. I got my own account just a little bit before the game went into the beta stage, because i wanted the lower price and the guarauntee of all future updates.