What were your first snakes, and how did you learn to keep them?
Things were different back then. I read every reptile book I could possibly get my hands on, which was about 3 or 4, and none of them were about husbandry. I'd never used the internet, I didn't even know what the internet was at the time. Blue globes I wired up myself as a kid (which wasn't that weird at the time), no thermostat, an enclosure design I wouldn't dream of using these days. Funnily enough, as bad as all that might sound, in hindsight my snakes were in better hands and thrived more than what most people manage with all the advice from the Facebook groups and pet shop 'advice' these days!
My first snakes were hybrid Antaresia sold to me as pure Townsville 'Children's Pythons' (back then all Antaresia were considered the same species, Liasis childreni). At the time I didn't know anything so I believed it until I learned a bit more.
My next snakes were Tiger Snakes. Times were different, I was a kid and sent in the form and payment (a money order from the post office, I think) for my license to keep venomous snakes. I'm pretty sure the rule was that you had to be 18 years old to get the license, but they sent it to me anyway. There were no courses back then (I think it was better that way) and most people who worked with venomous snakes taught themselves as kids in the local swamp. I had no training, no mentor, I just winged it and had a heap of fun back in those days.
The snake community was completely different back then. Most herpers were desperately trying to push snakes to be mainstream pets, and for better or worse eventually they did indeed succeed, and the herp community is now unrecognisable from what it was. I still remember the day I joined this forum, I was a university student running an experiment with geckoes, the was playingon the computer I had the apparatus hooked up to and found APS, and signed up. That was around the time the herp scene was in its most rapid period of change and it was becoming very easy to connect with other herpers online and see how insane they all were and how badly they were keeping their snakes and misinforming each other
Haha, good times.