My first electronics purchases (not things given to me, but things I actually bought) were so long ago...
I know I bought a stereo record player with attached speakers, plus an 8-track cassette player, in the early 1970s while I was stationed in Jacksonville FL.
But...the first serious purchases I ever made were made in the stereo shop of the Army exchange (PX) in Vicenza Italy in 1973. It was there that I bought a Pioneer SX626 receiver and a Pioneer PL50A turntable (see! I can remember model numbers!!!). I also bought a pair of Coral speakers. Never heard of them at the time and haven't seen any since, but they were splendid speakers (250 watts per speaker, IIRC). The speakers were stolen some 15 years later when I was in Naples Italy, but I still have the receiver and turntable.
My first laserdisc player was a Pioneer model. My first VHS was an RCA SelectaVision model...cost me nearly a thousand dollars at the time (1983-ish or '84-ish). It was wonderful, too. The slow motion feature was the best I've ever seen.
Of course, I invested in the RCA SelectaVision CED player, too. Ah, me. CED discs were amazing and had a better success rate, upon their introduction, of playability than did laserdiscs (which were prohibitively expenseive). When "Star Wars" was issued on home video for the first time, it cost only $24.95 on CED disc. The laser was nearly four times that amount.
Why it never caught on I'll never know.
The very first "new" (not used) TV that "I" bought for myself (my parents had bought me a new set one Christmas -- a GE model -- in 1979 or 1980) was a Sony 17-inch Trinitron that I purchased when I reitred from the Navy and was settling in here in Oakland. I still have that set, by the way, and it's now in my bedroom since it was supplanted in my living room a couple of years back by my Panasonic 37-inch plasma HDTV.
My first CD player was a portable I bought in 1984 when I was first assigned to USS Carl Vinson here in the Bay Area. I forget the make...it was a popular brand. There were so few CDs to choose from (that suited my tastes) that it took me nearly a year to accumulate 10. During a port visit in Honolulu, I went to a Sharper Image store and bought a pair of Bose Roommate speakers to complement my CD player (for those rare occasions when I could plug them in and play my music loudly...usually during a weekend stay in a motel on the island of Alameda).
