My mom got me the Basic D&D Rules Set (Red Box) for my 13th birthday, and I was hooked immediately. I traded my favorite X-Men comic book for the Expert D&D Rules Set and Module X1 (Blue Box) with a kid at school. I played those B/X sets until the covers wore out, and I dreamed of being able to purchase all FIVE boxed sets someday.
Alas, it wasn't meant to be. They were all out of print just a couple of years later, and I had to settle for the Rules Cyclopedia. It is still my favorite D&D book of all time, and I played it all through the rest of the 80s and the entire 1990s...but man, I really wish they had kept the original Larry Elmore artwork throughout.
Well, I'm a grown-up now, with a grown-up job and a grown-up eBay account. So I'm slowly acquiring those boxed sets, one by one, and I will have them all someday. Of course, if WotC would just make them available for Print On Demand for crying out loud, it would save me a lot of time and frustration.
Ah, nostalgia.