What was your first electronics project?

That brings back a memory of my grade 2 teacher showing us how to wind wire on a nail to make an electromagnet.

It was a crystal radio kit. I think I was about 6 years old. The one I remember more distinctly, though, was a Heathkit basic electronics course, where you build a VOM while learning about, e.g. E=IR. That was my first soldering exercise. I was maybe 8.

I think it was a "dusk till dawn" parking light for my dad's car. I hooked over the drivers side door glass and used an ORP12 cadmium sulphide sensor and a couple of scavenged transistors driving a small 12V bulb. I would have been around 12 years old I guess. From then on grew an obsession with electronics as a hobby and then a lifelong career in research and development. I still have a loft full of parts that are for dozens of imagined projects that I will tackle one day.............?

That's a great question. I'm sure a bunch of my first experiments where just hooking things to a battery and a switch, or putting together circuits from a "learning kit" onto a breadboard, so I won't be counting those.

I think my first, actual, real project was building a PIC programmer. It's one of the first PCBs I remember etching, and the first time I remember following all of the steps to a project, from researching several alternatives, selecting the best fit for my needs, gathering the materials, instructions and tools, all the way to completing an actual assembled gizmo that had a purpose.

It was an "Enhanced" NOPPP3 programmer, and I built it after someone recommended me to look into Microchip PICs (they knew I was passionate about programming and electronics, so they introduced me to microcontrollers and in the process casually changed my life).

First was a "manual answering machine" which was a notepad on a stand, with a toggle switch.
This worked  with the now foreign concept, that when you answer your landline phone and its not for you, you would take a message on the notepad, and flip the switch, which would illuminate a red LED, indicating a message was waiting for another person in your household. 

My first experience of Programming and Microcontrollers was some sort of PIC chip programming that was dictated out loud from the front of the class room by my, entirely not interested, Design & Technology teacher as if it was a recipe for a cake. 

"COLON, CLOSE BRACKET, RUN, ENTER. YOU ALL GOT THAT? GOOD! LETS CARRY ON"

It went in one ear and out the other.  As always you have good teachers and bad.
I had a sciences teacher who would always respond to my "oh that is cool, why does it work like that?" with "Because X, and Y, and that is built on Z".
Then I had a Mathematics teacher who rarely made me go "oh that is cool, why does it work like that?" and he would respond with "Because it does. Memorize it", resulting in my brain switching off. 

Who knows what would have happened if those teachers were switched! 

I'm also going to go with a crystal radio.  I don't remember a lot of detail.  Maybe I was six - so my Dad would have had to have helped.  I just remember knowing that I needed a good ground - which meant a water pipe - which meant the pipes under the bathroom sink.  I remember laying half in the tiny cabinet listening to radio stations and wondering how far away they were.

The Tandy 10-in-one and 100-in one kits, and:

source: www.ricardo.ch/.../

that was 40 years ago, I dont recall what it was, but its motivation was curiosity. its always curiosity.

colporteur said:

The BIOS chip was more difficult to get

I recall that IBM used to include the BIOS listing at the back of the technical manual supplied with the IBM PC.

IBM PC 5150 Technical Reference 6361453 : IBM : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive