Musicians of my era have come a long way in terms of equipment that is now available to them.
When I first began to play in a teenager band around 1965, I used a Silvertone guitar that belonged to my dad. It was a great instrument at the time and was bought from the Spiegle catalog. It was called their "Black beauty" model.

I never really owned an amp back then but I always knew someone who did, and so I always managed to play.
There were only a few in town that could play guitar and in a small town we were, after a short time, well known to all of the 14 year old girls...life was good!

My first real amp was a silvertone that was built into the guitar case and worked pretty well at the time.  Besides, it was all we could get our hands on in the small town of Carolina Beach, North Carolina.

I can't remember where we got our microphones, but I seem to recall someone having a brother that worked at a radio station and before you knew it we had 2 mics and 2 guitar amps. All we needed was a drummer, some songs to play and some place to play.
But we soon realized our voices weren't loud enough and we needed a PA system of some sort. We got our break  when the local VFW club threw out their old Bogan PA amp and we recovered it from their trash. It worked but was kind of scratchy and would blow tubes.
We built speakers from old jukebox speakers from some old jukeboxes that had been thrown out behind the bowling ally, and we were at last..a band.

Strings were another thing all together. There weren't a lot of choices because there wasn't a music store in town, but like most small towns back then you could buy strings from the local drugstore, either a set , or when you couldn't tie it together anymore, you could buy a single string. You could have any brand you wanted as long as it was Black Diamonds .

Jump ahead a few years and it's 1968. I was on my way to becoming a solid musician and I was ready for more professional equipment. My mother bought me a Gibson melody maker guitar and a Fender super reverb amp.
It was a perfect setup then and now, but it was short lived as the guitar was stolen when it was barely 3 weeks old, and never recovered.