People used to buy and sell P2P on the forum and I believe that was how the forum was introduced basically to fulfill the needs of buy and the sellers. I was checking old threads in meantime and when I saw This Thread and many others like this, I was into tears that why I was not here and bought some when such deals were being offered.

When I first came here though, there were enough sites which offered bitcoins purchase and selling, like btc-e was one of the biggest sites back then and although I never used, mt gox was considered a giant and it actually was as market crashed when they closed.