At the time, Gavin had a bitcoin 'faucet' that gave out bitcoins for free, and a few people were trading them for less than a cent each, but nothing serious.  You can probably find all the old posts on this forum still.  I was learning OpenCL programming and mining bitcoins with a video card so the pizza was a good deal for me.  I couldn't have known that my pizza trade would end up being such a big deal, or that so many others would become interested in bitcoin and thus drive the value up.  The people I traded with didn't know it was going to explode either, they just took a risk - spending their 'real' money to buy some guy pizza in exchange for some internet Monopoly money. 

Laszlo