My God, but you guys all sound so young!
I bought my first SLR in about 1960. I used it for a while then sort of moved away from photography until I went to Egypt in 1973. I took lots of pictures of the camp etc over there.
In 1982 I bought a used Konica SLR and some lenses including a 350 mm telephoto. Later I bought another Konica body and a couple more lenses. I really wanted to take bird pictures but found that the slow speed when using the long lens plus the fact that I still couldn't get the frame filling bird shots that I wanted ( even adding a x2 converter) made me give up on birds.
When I retired Kodak gave me a digital camera for a retirement present annd I've been taking pictures in great numbers ever since. Now I do a fair bit of digiscoping but I'm also very interested in close-ups of wildflowers.