Get yourself a copy of 'Digital Gold' by Nathaniel Popper. The latter stuff is kind of irrelevant, but it's very good at covering the earliest stages.
And you're right. It was very extremely quiet for quite some time. Via passages in that book you could tell that Satoshi got very excited if one person showed the slightest interest.
i say
Hal was more than enough.
and he was running, mining, testing and contributing from early days
