If you ask me what piqued my interest in electronics, it was the Tek 545 scope.
A short story:
My father, an architect and avid stereophile, built a home for the owner of a local broadcast station.
That person brought home one day the station's scope, hooked it up to the stereo amplifier, and played some music.
To me, seeing the wavy lines moving in rhythm with music, being displayed on a monstrous machine straight out of a science fiction movie, was utterly mesmerizing.
I started work as a teenage trainee technician at the Government run TV station around 1965. They had a few of those Tektonix 545 scopes, full of valves and those amazing ceramic tag strips. A beautiful piece of truly historic engineering, absolutely state of the art technology in the 1950's.