People who started in the 80s from a Choose Your Own Adventure / Lord of the Rings background with the Basic D&D rules probably didn't use minis as often.
I started playing D&D after playing the TSR board game "Dungeon!" a lot. It essentially boiled down the essence of D&D into a simple playable dungeon crawl in board game form.
Sometimes we improvised and modified the rules completely, such as:
- going from room to room as a group, instead of individually
- having some rooms empty while other rooms having several monsters in it, where the group would try to kill all the monsters and take the loot
- changing the health system so that a player or monster could be hit many times before dying
- having one "healer" character in the group which handled injured characters, who also did some fighting
- a primitive combat system of two or more players attacking the same monster
- creating random encounters with monsters in the hallways
- using the more powerful monsters from lower dungeon levels, as a "solo" type boss monsters at upper dungeon levels
- one person would be handling the random encounters, monsters, solo bosses, etc ... (ie. like a DM)
In essence, we unknowingly modified the Dungeon! rules into something resembling a more D&D style game. By the time any of us picked up the basic D&D box set, it was essentially a more precise codified version of our primitive "houserules" we used for our Dungeon! board games. None of us had any miniatures, but we used things like checkers/chess pieces or tokens from a monopoly game to represent the players and monsters in combat (on a kitchen table).
