Are those who joined the Ethereum ICO technical people? How were you able to join? What was the experience back then? Did you mine ETH? Did you participate in the launch by running a node? I'm curious to know as my friends talked a lot about recently and you are so lucky back then i think.
Only skill you needed was to send bitcoin, i mean there weren't smart contracts or anything like that to join in with. ETH was purely on the paper when the ico happened and if i recall correctly you could make an account to web page and buy your share of it with bitcoin, as that was the common way in those days.
You just needed to trust the person/team you send your money to. Showing dev's real identity wasn't common, so it required even more blind trust on the project.
What you got was pre-mined coins. And after Ethereum went live, you could mine it.