Spring of 1984 for me. I remember it vividly.

In elementary school everyone would bring there boom boxes to school and during lunch we'd all play them. Kids would gather into groups on the playground according to the music they liked. Well I had this gigantic monstrosity which took 10 D cell batteries to run and was blaring Def Leppard's High n Dry to my hearts content. When I went to fast forward to "Mirror Mirror" this girl comes over to our group and proceeds to tell me how I am going to break my radio because "You aren't supposed to press the play and the fast forward button at the same time dummy!"

I jumped up and said, "It has a P.S.S - programmable search system! I can hit this silver button along with the FF button and choose up to 3 songs in advance and have the deck automatically go to the beginning of the song."

This girl was ugly anyway so I put her in her place but I realized then that while most people wanted the biggest radio on the block I was more interested in the features and sound quality.