Hmm, I think that my first mod was OptiFine because the laptop I had at the time, well what I was playing minecraft on anyways, was pretty weak and was mostly used for creating documents before I got my hands on it, so I needed to be able to get more fps out of the game since it was so low. It helped by a lot though, which made my life easier.
I'm pretty sure first was Single Player Commands, then Optifine. Those are the only two mods I've ever used, I'm pretty much a Vanilla player. Now I just use Optifine.
didn't work
The second was InventoryTweaks.
Within the first five minutes of my first ever Minecraft game I started to wonder why there's no automatic handling of inventory items of any sort.
"We serial killers walk beside you, we walk behind you, we walk the spaces in your mind where you are afraid to go" - Anonymous