G'day, Gary!
I've just had a good weekend - played two new excellent board games: Dirk Henn's Shogun, and Glenn Drover's Age of Empires III. The latter is really interesting - it's actually very much an Eurogame, and an excellent one at that.
And I also got to DM my very first session of oD&D! The loss of a couple of players from my regular Friday campaign for the next 12 weeks indicated that I should put it on hold until they returned, so I turned to oD&D to fill the void. Actually running the game showed me that the essential experience of D&D: exploring the depths of the underworld - hasn't changed all that much (well, not the way I run it, I guess), even though the rules are now quite different.
I do have one question: How on earth did 1st level PCs survive? As most beginning characters would die in one hit, I can only assume that they made great use of ranged combat and spells to survive the first level... although superior armour would help. (Poor Sarah began with only 30 gp after rolling a 3 on 3d6 for her starting funds!)
Cheers!