I was building course material 'by hand' cobbled together with bits of xml and lots of ropey custom Java. I'd looked at Moodle around v1.2 but wasn't especially impressed (can't remember why) and didn't particularly want to learn PHP.
I gave in and stuck it on a server around version 1.4. By the time version 1.5 came out we had about 15,000 users. It's kept me in gainful employment ever since.