I'd been aware of version control for years, in the pre-distributed era of CVS, as SVN started to be a thing. I never used it much other than sometimes to check out code to take a look at it. Usually tarballs were available and there seemed to be little point to use a check out over having a tarball at hand, so I never paid it much attention. Occasionally I'd run
cvs co $SOME_URL
take a look or do whatever with the code, and moved on. I almost never used it to track any changes I made, never came close to submitting patches or working at the level of being a committer. Once or twice I thought that it would be good to learn about it and set up my own server, but that seemed to be more trouble than it was worth without having a specific project to use with it. It was way too heavy to do for just some sort of toy learning project, especially when working alone.
I only really started to pay attention to version control as version control when I began to work with the LNX-BBC project.
I don't remember which non-distributed VCS it started off with, I think it was SVN. I got adept enough at checking out new versions and running local builds, but as I was just testing I didn't really learn anything much about making changes, submitting them, or committing them.
This was my first encounter of the Catch-22 around learning development practice before DVCSen, in which the feedback loop for learning version control was pretty long--newbies aren't given commit access to the central repository, for very good and understandable reasons, so newbies don't have much opportunity for hand's on learning about producing commits.
Eventually, LNX-BBC moved towards arch aka Tom Lord's arch, what is now GNU arch. I don't remember now how well that worked out for me, particularly, but I think some of the frustrations surrounding that move ended up draining away enthusiasm for the larger effort. I do know that between then and now, another DVCS, Bazaar became a contender before git eclipsed it into mature project maintenance mode.
Even so, that was my introduction to DVCS--arch and the attempt to migrate LNX-BBC to it.
(For those interested in small live CD images, check out Finnix).