Hard to believe it's been 30 years!  

There's a huge selection of long D&D articles to commemorate the occasion, over at:

GameSpy: Magic & Memories: The Dungeons & Dragons Index - Page 1

Including a nice new Gygax interview - first I've seen since his stroke; he's recovering nicely.  Here's my favorite quote:

"The new D&D is too rule intensive. It's relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It's done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good."

Someone rolled a 20 with his vorpal blade ...

I got the 3.0 PHB for Christmas a couple years back.  I haven't actually played the game since about 1994, since I've been busy doing development on my own game world based on 1st Ed.

Remarkably, many of the game mechanic 'tweaks' I was proposing have shown up more or less in 3.0.  My first thought: "Oh, they finally fixed 2nd Edition, that's great!"  

But then I kept reading and realized I couldn't actually figure out how to make a character given the ridiculously complicated set of options.  I guess I'm obsolete.  My feeling on it is that it's "officially sanctioned" munchkinism, and I'm a "do it yourself" munchkin purist.