Oh I overlooked that question. Points and levels are explained here: Build your reputation and get rewarded in the community. It's an imperfect system but I suppose it encourages participation.
Prior to the present "point" system this site had a predecessor (two predecessors in fact, beginning with the original Apple Tech Exchange) that merely kept a tally of the number of posts someone contributed which was arguably less useful.
Apple Tech Exchange transitioned to Apple Discussions, and later Apple Support Communities. About July 2000 everyone's accumulated "points" were transitioned to the current system according to some formula lost to history. Perhaps someone else might remember that formula because I don't.
ASC shows when a participant first joined (if you allow your profile to show that information) but there are a few here whose activity predated even that date. For example my participation here began in the mid-1990s using a dialup modem and Compuserve. Apple Tech Exchange pages looked like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000229162121/http://support.info.apple.com/te/te.taf
The pages loaded even slower than that.
What did we do prior to dialup modems and Compuserve. We had local community meetups where a bunch of Apple nerds got together in the basement of a library or church once in a while to swap software and discuss problem-solving. Mine happened to be known as the local MUG for "Macintosh User Group" but that name was very common. Yes we had coffee mugs made up with the colorful Apple logo.