I'm into the series since the Il2 Demo 2001 as many others obviously.
I was around 13 and installed it from a pc games magazine CD together with a school mate from mine.
Funny enough I had a pretty crappy joystick without rudder control and we were at first wondering why the Il2 keeps steering right during the takeoff.
We thought it was a wrong calibration issue from my joystick and after this didn't help, we thought that the game has still some bugs
Anyway soon after that I bought the full version and we spent hundreds of hundreds of hours flying il2 with my class mates (I convinced three other guys to fly with us) online after school.