I started about 1986, but was rather young. My friend had a neighbor who was a grade ahead of us and they invited me to play (I thought they were talking about a video game). Got hooked the first day. My first campaign wasn't actually D&D, it was a science fiction RPG. But we went into D&D a few months later. All I remember is getting killed by zombies.
When the 2E PHB came out in 1989 is when I really got into gaming and started GMing as well. I pretty much ran Ravenloft all through that period. I loved the boom of settings at the time. Everyone in the the group ran something different: a homebrew, dark sun, al qadim, planescape, etc. my groups in the 90s played a lot of other games as well like TMNT, Tales from the Floating Vagabond, Star Wars, call of cthulu, torg, etc. TORG made a good impression on me.