At the piddliest price levels I'm not sure there was much or any actual trading going on. Everyone was mining.
Have a read of this to see the level of market 'action'
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92.0If you did want to buy it then it was mainly through bitcoin otc with paypal but even then people weren't inclined to trust newbies. One guy was given 2000 coins by someone who felt sorry for him when no one would do a deal.
It's very easy to assume you would've loaded up when it was 1300 coins for $1 but the chances are they would've been lost in a hardware failure, been scammed or sold off much earlier. Pretty hard to resist when your outlay had gone up 1300x to dollar parity within a year or so.
I read about someone who had about 350K coins in the early days. The temptation to sell when they hit a dollar must have been enormous.