As we all know (or should know, anyways), StarCraft came out in early 1998 with BroodWar coming out a few months later. The first time I heard about it was in 1999, my junior year in high school, from my best friend.
A little background about me at the time: I played soccer and lacrosse throughout high school. I just started to get popular with the ladies freshman year. So as I result I felt I had to keep my 'technology savvy' side closeted. This meant being a complete douche bag to all my friends, whenever we were at school. I had known my best friend since about birth, but he was the stereotypical "nerd". So that made me the asshole who alienated his friends for a higher social status.
Anyways, we would usually go to my friends house after school to do homework and play video games (PlayStation, N64, PC, and whatever else). Well sometime in early '99 he bought StarCraft, this was the beginning, the beginning of an addiction. The next months were filled with StarCraft, a lot of SP, a little B.Net, and even more v. AI s. It wasn't until around late-ish 2000 that we started to follow the Korean StarCraft scene, via broodwar.com
We weren't able to watch anything really but we still enjoyed reading about Grrrr...'s playing. Looking back its awesome to see a foreigner being on top of the scene, but back then thats just the way things were. Grrr..., Maynard, Pillars, they were all foreign and they were all awesome.
I think that ends up through the year 2000. Pretty boring but that was the reality back then. No YouTube and no replays. So reading was all I could really do. But the next few years are the best...