My hobby started in 1967 with a gifted 5 gallon stainless steel Metaframe with a few guppies, and a really noisy 1950's red air-pump and boxfilter.
The air-pump had a habit of going out of trim and making a really loud buzzing sound. It had a little brass thumb-wheel that you played with to make it pump less or more air. It was really awful, The new permanent magnet Whisper and Metaframe dual diaphragm pumps were like a godsend in comparison.
My need for more fish progressed to my buying from our little variety store that sold fish, plants, and more aquariums, with my extra chore money and birthday gifts. The guppy's BTW, reproduced at an alarming rate.
And with my parents house, our kitchen dining room had a pass-through shelf with a 96" two bulb fluorescent light fixture recessed above it. This became the natural place to eventually put all of my 10 gallon and that 5 gallon tanks, all four of them. I also discovered that the (cheaper..) Metaframe air powered SlimJim HOB filters were quieter, and took up less room internally than the gurgling box filters, but the SlimJims were also using siphon tubes, and were forever losing their siphon if I didn't keep up the tanks water levels.
As a young teen I discovered that we had a local Angelfish breeder who had set up in town and had 3, outside circular concrete pools filled with White Clouds. He also dabbled with breeding various rare tetras. I bought a small school of the WCMM from him for about 4 dollars, 50 cents a fish, and gave away all my baby guppies to my friends. My first egg-layer success was with White Cloud Mountain Minnows.
There was a local park with a big pond nearby that had annual spring hatchings of Daphnia in the fish-less part, and lots of baby goldfish spawned from the tossed and dumped goldfish living in the section with fish. The baby goldfish larva were easy to catch and fed my Gouramies and the Paradise Fish. It was also a good lesson in biology and what critters in the live food to not take home. Like discovering Gold Rimmed Water Beetle larva that would mow through your tank of little grow-outs in a couple days.
I also learned from my dad how to cut glass and I made a 17 gallon, square dimensioned tank from old 1/4" greenish plate-glass for my bedroom, that housed a few tetras and a Roundtail Paradise fish. (Try finding one of those nowadays..) My first success with Cryptocorynes, ( I think they were C. Affinis, dark, mottled green with reddish under-leaves and didn't mind low light levels.) was with the DIY tank.
That tank took a couple of build attempts to get it to not leak, big ugly silicone fillets was the key. I also got my first electric motor powered HOB filter for that tank, Forgot the maker, they sold it at Bi-Mart. It wasn't the Metaframe Dyna-Flow, but from that same year they appeared. It had a small, 110 AC volt, C-frame motor in a little, gray plastic housing with a little cooling fan, that fit into a molded in recess on the filter-box's rim and a drive shaft down to an impeller in the clear plastic pump base. It was really quiet and could pump far more water flow than that 15 gallon tank needed. But it also had a really large diameter, curved inflow siphon that was a big PITA to restart. I had to use my thumb to hold the water in because it was larger than my index finger, and was not an easy ergonomic exercise. Probably why is was cheaper than the Metaframe Dynaflow. I also had one of the last of the 'high flow' air-powered overflow type HOB's, but it didn't break the water surface much, and you'd get organic surface films with it.
I'm surprised I never killed or cooked my fish with those horrible old buzzy water heaters. I'm sure they never stayed within a few degrees of keeping the temperature stable, but they all seemed to work after a fashion.