I started with a 3m x 0.5m x 0.5m system in 1992, I was only about 10 years old so I don't really remember all the details...
I had 3 MH Pendants, not sure of the wattage or Kelvin of them...
I ran a UV, reverse UG filter and a Eheim Canister... Although the UV filter was only connected for a very short while before it blew and ended up being a dust collector in the garage...
The end... hehe
How times have changed, by the looks of it overflows and sumps were around back then, but with no internet I was very limited with knowledge...
I would guess I had Live Rock back then, but didn't know it was live...
Everything lived all the way through except a Shrimp I lost after about 2 years... I remember fighting a never ending hair algae battle... I had test kits, but they just showed me numbers and if they were within acceptable levels, I had no idea what these numbers meant though and thankfully they always looked to be alright, if one was out i wouldn't have known what to do... I did however know how to measure the salinity and that was good enough for me...
I mixed salt water in buckets that had been used for cleaning, because of the size of the tank I would change between 80 and 100l a month using plain old tap water... It was a mission being 11 years old and trying to carry massive buckets of water through the house, then having to lift them almost as high as my head to pour the water into the tank... My parents have since changed their carpets...
I had 2 sea horses, a blue ribbon eel that would eat out of my hand, a domino, a copperband, a pair of boxing shrimps, a green brittle star, another redish star and a few corals which I had no idea what they were as well a few other small fish, wouldn't be able to tell you which one's though...
Everything got on with one another, as far as I know... I fed blood worms to the fish and small grey frozen fish to the eel... I had some additives that i would dose once a week, memory also gets the better of me here and I have no idea what additives they were...
Anyway, I could talk forever about my tank, but basically that's how I started...
10 years later, it's about time I got back into the hobby, seeing as I can actually understand what's going on with the system if something goes wrong... Guess I was just a lucky kid to have been able to keep a healthy marine setup back then... Or maybe marines aren't as fagile as we think...