Oh boy...
One online friend constantly talked about a game called Infiniminer and how everyone should play it, etc. This was back in December 2009, and he was right; I had a hell of a time, especially when we actually had our own little lava survival.. go figure! There was literally only one server, which had a max of 10 players at once, and I asked why such a great game was missing players. The answer I got from everyone? Minecraft.
When I went to check it out, in January of 2010, I constantly tried loading classic servers only to get the same error over and over, I think regarding lwjgl.jar. I believe Google never gave me a solution either, or I just never even bothered to search it.
Skip ahead to June 2010, and.. well, this might sound bad, but I went on the /v/ section (video games) of 4chan. Honestly, if you know what that is, you'll think I could've been a bad guy, but all I did was look around for video games I liked and never posted. Ever. Anyways, Minecraft was very popular there, and this time I actually realized the "premium" (back then it was infdev, which came before alpha) rather than classic.
There were endless threads about it there, and they all seemed so amazing. Sadly, I can't buy anything online, so I had to use a public account to play. Once the password was changed, I convinced my mom to buy some card that lets you get PayPal money so I could get my own account.
...I can't really remember how this comes into play with classic, though, but I'll say what I do remember about actually stumbling upon a server from TheOne's. When I first played classic, I joined a server called "Just another Minecraft server." There was a fairly large building I saw, and when I noticed a problem, I modified it a bit, then started changing too many minor things and got yelled at by some staff member. Long story short, I disagreed with him and he was so strict that I got offended, the actual server owner (and server itself) seemed way too unprofessional and boring since it was just building, so I moved on.
Our old servers had a lot of players, which is why I found them. I
think my first server in this community was our "new" lava survival, coded by PixelEater, which was planned to replace our other "old" one. In the end it wasn't out for the public for long.. and I got banned from it.. and we stuck with the "old" one, LISTINGS made updates, etc etc. And I remember breaking a dam in classic lava. No idea.
I played in our actual classic lava for, like, not even 20 total hours and rushed towards applying for trusted (back when
Pick Yer Poison was HC/Director) and, with some strange luck, actually got accepted (although my application was up for a week). And here I am now!