This sounds strange. In the early days, I'm not aware if there was such thing, but it's odd as there weren't even services accepting it. May I ask you a question? What's this that made you currently concerned for this wallet retrieval?

I mean, even if you had bought bitcoins 3 years ago, you'd want to make sure they're safe. Let alone if they were bought from the very beginning. You can't have seen the price rising for a decade straight and not spare a moment to make sure your money's safe.

I'm just curious. Don't respond if you don't feel comfortable.

If it's takes too long, usually it's because there are too many possible combination, slow hardware or both of them. If you have GPU, you should configure btcrecover to use GPU which give massive speed improvement (up to 96x times according to the guide). Check this guide  https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/GPU_Acceleration/. If you could share your token file (make sure to change listed character/word for your own security), other member might be able to suggest more efficient token which reduce possible combination.

Alternatively, wait for few more years where Bitcoin price might be higher and GPU is far faster. Don't forget to make multiple backup of your wallet.dat file and write down part/characteristic of your password.

Wallet.dat from around ~2015. Odds are pretty big that it's a bitcoin core wallet file.
You could potentially use btcrecover to try to bruteforce your password, but everything depends on what you know about the password + how complex it is + the amount of hardware/time you're willing to spend

Do you mean you got paid in BTC 14 years ago to participate in activities? That makes no sense since 13 years ago when bitcoin was created nobody would have paid you in bitcoin.

It comes down to how much you know about the password. Is the length all you know? If yes then there is no hope at all.
But if you know more like what words you used in your password (maybe you usually use your name, your pet's name, something like that) or numbers you usually use in a password then you can reduce the search space to a more reasonable size that  can be searched within reasonable time.

ok, but that doesn't really answer my question... You say you forgot your password, but my question is: your password for *which wallet*.
There are dozens of wallets, some still active, some no longer maintained, hardware wallets, online wallets, paper wallets,... if we don't know which wallet you used, we can't give specific advise on how to bruteforce your password (and even then, we cannot give any guarantee.... bruteforcing is only as good as the amount of time and hardware you're willing to spend... and a lot of times it's impossible).

The very first version of the bitcoin reference client is 13 years old, at that point there were only a handfull of users... So 14 years is impossible.
This being said: could you tell us which wallet client you are using? Sometimes it's possible to bruteforce, but everything depends on the wallet you used and how strong of a password you used.