:0 that's interesting | Versions before 1.3 are FREE on the minecraft launcher

Any minecraft version is free with a little bit of trickery

I mean, I bought it in beta and have bought it since several times over.
- I bought it in Alpha and was told I’d have it forever and Microsoft deleted my account and I hate them
- bought it since several times over.
  Same - Xbox 360 (£8 plus several texture packs), Java (£15), Google Play MCPE (£5) & Xbox One (£25), roughly in order. An old friend of mine got Java Edition for £5 on release in 2009
- I hope before M$ took over. Also, you therefore now have multiple M$ accounts?

I see your compliance with Microsoft and their anti-consumer capitalist tactics, and I raise you Freesm Launcher. Every version is free and, as is the reason for Freesm being borne of Prism Launcher, you are not required to connect your Microsoft account. You can still play the game you love while boycotting Microsoft for their takeover and enshittification. Remember, games used to be made to entertain people. Now they're made (by shady devs and evil publishers) to extort and farm people.

Minecraft was genuine. We can keep it that way.

That's quite the Overgeneralization you got there, but true for a sizable portion of games these days, especially anything AA-AAA. Play more indie games, there are plenty that are still made with love for entertainment.
Have a fucking upvote, you hit a home-run with that truthbomb.

1.3 was a very different game from the current version, tho.

It's in this in between that, nostalgia aside, has no retro appeal like Alpha to Beta 1.7.3, but has a half borked experience system that requires 50 levels for a full enchantment, enchants use all levels of the requirement and not the top 3, no anvils to repair or combine tools, and your only experience sources are mobs. It suffers from stupidly large and boring oceans, and the nether and the end are pretty barebones.
I started around that era of Minecraft but I'd never go back.
- My first version was Xbox 360, TU1 or TU2. Wiki says it's equal to Java Beta 1.6.6 which checks out, as I didn't have stone bricks, the darkest wood was spruce, sheep dropped wool if you punched them and villagers all looked the same. The nostalgia is there but I wouldn't hang my hat there again.
  My first Java edition was 1.7.2 and that'll always be a favourite of mine. Before the ocean monuments and pointless stone variants, before attack cooldowns and shielding.
  There are several versions I prefer because the following update added something I didn't like, but I'd be sacrificing a feature I wanted from the future. Which is another pro for Java: modders have always been backporting the best update features. The spawn egg redesign from 1.21.5, for example.

I'm more surprised that there are demo versions that old. I've never heard of that feature

you can play any release through the launcher

Isnt minecraft one of the easiest paid games to play for free?

You can play singleplayer and multiplayer on servers that allow that by:
\ •setting up a fabric project
\ •getting one of the many launchers that allow you to play the game without a paid account(i like prism launcher cracked)
\ •downloading the official prism launcher and doing this (i havent tested it so i am unsure if it actually works)