How were the first accounts created on Steem?

A public blockchain is like an open history book. One that cannot change.

^{Well, that's not entirely true, because a fork can be designed to reverse a blockchain to a certain block in its evolution. But that's an exceptional case. And versions of the unforked blockchain would likely still be available to consult if anyone wants to see what was reversed.}

I like history. And while human history has often been re-written to suite one party or another, blockchain is impartial and records history as is.

I sometimes dive into the history of the Steem blockchain. That happened here for example.

A few days ago I began having a rather unusual curiosity: which are the very first accounts created on Steem?

...and I hit a roadblock.

That's because the first accounts created on Steem don't seem to have account_create transactions on the blockchain. I checked the first 10000 blocks and there isn't such a transaction, although there are accounts acting as witnesses or miners by then.

@steem only started to create accounts on the blockchain using the known account_create transactions in block 983,986, that's after more than 34 days after Steem started, if I didn't mess up at the arithmetic.

In the meantime my question evolved from:
Which are the very first accounts created on Steem?
to the question in the title:
How were the first accounts created on Steem?

The first question is rather easy to answer if you make a few connections. In the first 100+ accounts there are multiple accounts of the same few people/entities, used for mining, since that was an option then. Still a curiosity would be who are the two accounts before @initminer, which has id #3. :)

For the second question I don't have an answer. Was there a different procedure to create accounts in the early mining days, that didn't involve broadcasting an account_create transaction to create an account?

Anyone knows how those early accounts were created, meaning what is the transaction on the blockchain matching those account creation operations?

Or anything that can help. Like a piece of code... :)