My absolute first contact with Traveller must have been early-to-mid 80s. I'd done a lot of random RPGs previously - D&D, Star Frontiers, some homebrew systems - and had a get-together with a bunch of guys from a BBS I frequented. Spotted a copy of Mercenary, recognized it as a game, flipped through it, and promptly forgot about it.
A couple years later, I was wandering through a bookstore, waiting for my mom to finish browsing, and noticed a stack of books with something on the cover about "Free Trader Beowulf". I didn't make any connection to that BBS party, but it was an RPG with rules for creating worlds. I had to have it. I don't remember whether I convinced my mom to buy it or if I saved up and bought it myself, but I got my GDW boxed set and spent many happy hours rolling characters and subsectors, but, for some reason, I never actually got anyone else interested in playing it.