I ghetto multiboxed DAoC before moving to WoW. I say ghetto as I wasn't really multiboxing as we know it today. Was basically running 4 PCs and 4 clients with 4 mice to do it. It worked pretty good as I was mostly doing PVE anyway, and DAoC wasn't like WoW -- you actually had one or two characters whose sole job was buffing the group and then standing there looking useless. So I really only drove 2 at a time at most.

When I got tired of soloing in WoW, I made a 2nd account and tried that. Still sucked almost as bad as solo. Then I saw Team Wizzy's videos actually doing 4 PBAoE toons in DAoC from one keyboard/mouse and knew I had to do that in WoW. Of course, this was before I found out about dual-boxing.com and (if I recall correctly) before keyclone/octopus/etc. were even created. Wrote a little client-server app in VB5 that did your basic key broadcast. Tested it on two accounts and it worked, so I bought the other 3 accounts and never looked back.

TL;DR = I knew how to macro and multibox before finding the more advanced tools to do it. I agree that having a tool that automates everything is fine, until that tool stops working. Then you're stuck with no clue how to fix or even diagnose the root cause of the problem.