My first fw tank that I owned myself was a heavily, heavily overstocked 5 gallon that I bought with some money my parents left us when they went on vacation (ok, it was for food, but I wanted a fish tank). Boy did the LFS owners see me coming cause they loaded up this unsuspecting kid with a brand new 5 g and about 30 small tropical fish and sent him on his way (by bus) home to figure it out before he killed everything.
Fortunately, when my dad came back, he saw the tank, took me to Fraser Aquarium and bought me a new 33g. That was back when I was a weee little lad of eight years old.
My first sw tank was in the early 80s (around 1980-81) and it was a seahorse tank. 10 gallons with no live rock (what's live rock???) and I kept the wc seahorse alive for almost a year on live brine shrimp that I would cycle out to Main Aquarium in Vancouver to buy every week. Then there was a huge storm in San Francisco and all the brine shrimp that they usually collected for the petshop trade were washed out to sea and the poor little guy eventually starved
cause I couldn't raise adult brine shrimp from eggs fast enough. 30+ years later, still traumatized (jk) but really, still remember that terrible feeling of hoping a new brine shrimp shipment would come in time and being disappointed each time.
My first two bigger sw tanks was in the mid-80s. Had a 33g for a Volitan lionfish (got it at 3" and raised to over 12" before he poisoned me while I was cleaning his glass and I sold him. The other tank was a 110g with a Passer King Angel, Smooth Horn Shark, Moorish Idol, and Snowflake Moray Eel. 110g was the largest tank you could get back then and I used to hand-feed all these fish with squid and smelts. Wow, that was 30 years ago. Ok, now I feel old.
Anthony