The first one does not count... it was a lame rectangular tank, small, maybe 2 gallons, with a gold fish, in the living room - a 'nano' tank in today's parlance, and I was in charge of feeding it. Not too much, etc. It was a family aquarium, and I was the maintenance guy (at about 6 years of age).
My real first aquarium, as I see it, was a bit later, when I got a tank in my own room, and I could really take charge. My reading at the time was mostly about natural aquariums, and there is a very good (Dutch) website, about the natural landscape in Holland, which has a great section about the ecological aquarium. It is in Dutch, and these online translations are not all that great, so don't get your hopes up, but you can get an idea. The bottom line is the drawings there are the type that I remember, and my early attempts were at some how catching various little animals that lived in nearby lakes and creeks, and see if I could not keep them in my little tank. Eventually that proved too difficult, the things I wanted to catch were hard to catch, and if I caught them they often did not last too long. In the end, I switched to tropical fish, mostly guppies, to keep it simple and cheap, later came mollies, and maybe a few other species. For the most part I always had natural plants, but otherwise my concepts of an ecological equilibrium of sorts were not very sophisticated.
Interestingly, I am now starting to recognize why my original inclination of always attempting to achieve some sort of natural equilibrium, and focus on natural plants, and creatimg realistic environments was a bit of a Dutch tradition, and the reason why this was often referred to as a Dutch aquarium.
Collectively, I would term these efforst my "first" aquariums, and the experiment extended into my teenage years. At some point I guess girls won out over fish... and the aquariums went by the way side.
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