My VERY first recording setup was an old vacuum tube-based reel to reel recorder (bell and howell) my father abandoned in the attic. I cleaned it up, redid some of the brittle wiring, and it worked! It had stereo RCA inputs and outputs, a headphone jack, and a 1/4" mic jack. I bought a pair of headphones and a cheap microphone at radio shack. I was about 13 or 14. The microphone and the headphones were an Xmas gift from my parents.
A year or two later, I had saved enough allowance and lawn mowing money to purchase a Tascam 244, a double-speed cassette-based porta studio. Was a nice unit, I still have it and use it for "doodling as it has a built in mixer, simplistic as it is.
In 1987, I was 19, and I purchased
a Fostex 450-16, a 16 ch, 4 buss analog mixer, which I also still have today in the attic. I liked this mixer VERY much, even though at the time brand new it was in the 1600-1800 range, I don't remember exactly. I bought used out of the newspaper a Tascam 238 Syncaset, which like the 244 is a double-speed cassette multitrack recorder, except it didn't have the mixer bits, AND it was an eight track recorder instead of four. I kept this setup for long time, until I purchased my first Akai DR8, 8ch digital hard disk recorder. I was in love! Tacam also introduced the TMD-1000 16-ch 4-buss digital mixer, for about $1600 street price at the time, so I snagged one of those as well. I was absolutely in love with both units - simply, reliable, easy to use. Then I snagged
a DR16 (16ch digital hard disk recorder) and bought another TMD-1000, and cascaded them together. Then I snagged another DR16 on ebay, and a Tascam TMD-4000 (32ch, 8buss digital mixer) to go with it. Then over the last six or seven years, I've ended up with the TMD4000, six TMD1000's, six DR16's and two DR8's, all off e-bay over the years.
This was home studio stuff... I've (co)owned three pro studios over the years which for the most part, had a totally different class of equipment.