Great topic. I always assumed people's favorite eras were the ones when they were kids, but I'm curious to find out what participants have to say about this.

My parents got our first PC in the second half of the '80s. It was an XT clone with CGA and I was 9 at the time. I played lots of early DOS games with this machine, but a couple of years later we upgraded the machine with EGA and I started playing Lucasfilm adventure games - I think this is probably were my best gaming memories reside.

I also have great memories of playing 386, 486 and Pentium games as a teenager. I find the late DOS games especially to still have great replay value, even to this day.

I was still playing in my early 20s in the windows 98 era with a Pentium II machine, but somehow the memories don't have the same flavor. I think the earlier games made a deeper impression on me because I was a kid and thus much more impressionable. Nowadays it's really hard for me to get interested in modern games at all... 😵

So MS-DOS, 87-96 is where it stands for me 😎

MMaximus wrote:

I always assumed people's favorite eras were the ones when they were kids, but I'm curious to find out what participants have to say about this.

This. So mine is the Amstrad CPC + XT-Hercules era. Why? No logic, especially for the XT. But hey, this is when I had most fun. Kids stuff, irreplaceable.
If I had to add a second one, I'd say the BBS era.

For me it was the 486 era.. Because when my dad purchased a low cost Headstart Explorer i didnt really get the full experience in the 80s.. on XT style computers.. It was all basic stuff we had on this XT clone.. Yellow / orange colored amber monitor, CGA output, Head start Bus mouse.. Intergrated keyboard on the computer case.. no optional harddisk installed (only floppy`s where used) no external soundcard so all PC-speaker. I think if we had a system with the full package i would think opposite..

I was a child back then, so i didnt had a computer purchase myself, because i did not had any money for that.. or had work..Because of to young.

I see the 286 as a step up on the XT class system, it wasnt more then that.. Also my dad had an DX 386-33 highscreen system back then.. Really liked that much very much, but i wasnt really thrilled like in the 486 aera.. Also really liked the Pentium 1 era.. But for me the 486 class systems are high priority on my list.

My dad also bought our first PC in 1987 (an Olivetti M19 - an XT clone).
However, I can relate to Robin4's commentary.
The PC became very limited in terms of really enjoying the full experience of playing games from the late 80's.
It wasn't until late 1991, after we got a 386DX-40, that I could really enjoy playing those games in full 256 colour VGA 😀.

However, I still have find memories of those days and my favourite computing era actually stretches from 1987 right up to 1999.

Probably the 94-97 time when PC started to have a real competent hardware race going on many fronts finally shedding off its slow-adlib-box perception, eventually tearing me off the nintendo consoles 😀

The late 1990s were an exciting time. A lot changed in very little time. I believe the cost of computer memory dropped sharply mid-1990s for some technical reason, which energized the whole industry.

Now. Why? Because you can still dig up whatever antique hardware you like and build the amazing "retro" system of your dreams. Meanwhile, hobby hardware is a huge thing & is cheap as chips, homebrew games are abound for every system & are better than the 1st-party stuff from back in the day, nearly all the tech info & dev utils, drivers, etc. you might want are readily available on the internet, you can get at helpful answers to whatever bizarro problem you're having on a variety of social media, and modern PCs have gotten powerful enough that you can run a 10-year-old system as a daily driver just fine and not get caught up spending all your spare money in the upgrade rat race.

Want to run a BBS? You can do that! Want a C64 with a flash drive? You can do that! Want to build your own retro-inspired architecture with an FPGA & off-the-shelf LCD display? You can do that! Want to play what-if on a completely virtual fantasy system that doesn't correspond to any hardware? You can do that! Etc. I can go on.

Playing with retro gear is a lot of fun, but take a minute to realize how much better we have it now than when any of this stuff was current. 😀

Errius wrote:

The late 1990s were an exciting time. A lot changed in very little time. I believe the cost of computer memory dropped sharply mid-1990s for some technical reason, which energized the whole industry.

Well it was artificially inflated for a year by an epoxy encapsulation factory fire... or at least they milked it for price fixing.

Have you noticed though, every 3 years like clockwork there's some "disaster" that sends RAM prices shooting up.

xjas wrote:

Playing with retro gear is a lot of fun, but take a minute to realize how much better we have it now than when any of this stuff was current. 😀

Very true! I was going to say 90's but you're right, I spent most of my teens lusting after hardware that I couldn't hope to afford, or stuck with some arcane compatibility problem that my small circle of nerd friends couldn't help with, or in a rage because someone picked up the phone while I was trying to download something from a slow as molasses BBS / early internet. It was a magical, exciting time to be into computers, but there was a lot of frustration and disappointment involved too.

And as much as I loves me some retro DOS action, modern games are awesome.

My three favourite are '99-'00, '05-'06 and around '08.

I love the first because those days have such a special place in my heart. I was getting into computing and reading about all this amazing hardware I could never even think about convincing my parents to buy me. So many games came out that I still play to this day then. Sadly, this period's pricing is really over inflated right now.

'05-'06 because that's when I started doing my own PCs seriously, and really caring about it. Hardware was starting to get really exciting with dual core CPUs, x64 becoming more popular, the game changing 8800GTX and modern SLI. Hardware manufacturers started putting more effort into looks, watercooling was starting to pick up beyond people putting together crap in their garage and Broadband was becoming widely accessible (at least where I lived), which lead to awesome online gaming, MMOs and for me, the golden age of online PC gaming and social networking.

'08-early '09 because that hardware is just fun as hell to overclock and get down and dirty with. It's really cheap ignoring the absolute top end. Core2Quad Extreme, the (in)famous D5400XS, and the HD4890 / GTX 290/295. I love this stuff so much and want to invest more time and money into it, but as I said the real good stuff is hard to source or expensive.

I love building to game on, building for the sake of building, or building just to make something crazy, over the top and unique. It's all good to me.

Because having a SLOT-1 CPU as opposed to a Socket 370 one looks cosmetically bad ass, I'll go with 98-2000 😎
Also we have tons of impractical and obsolete multimedia keyboards, mice and all those peripherals - yes it's even bad-ass-er than RGB, why not. 😎 😎 😎 😎

I don't know. The 90s, I guess. As it was a time of convergence.
Of old and new. Not only in terms of technology, but also cultural. I fondly remember :
Using a pager, pre-WWW on-line services, BBSes, messy but colourful/handcrafted homepages, fax machines, chess computers, tapes, VHS cassettes,
visting amusement parks, real mobile phones, wired phones that used pulse dialing, cyberspace/virtual reality, blinking shoes, etc.

As for computing/gaming, it was both funny and sad at the same time to me.
While old computers from the 80s (incl. non-x86 platforms) where still around and in daily use for a while
(for example, something like an IBM 5170 with a green monitor from '84 could run current Windows 3.x software),
things on the PC market evolved so fast, it was hard to keep up with it sometimes (think of these over-drive chips).

Also, about the time when the PS1 arrived, the era of 2D and non-FPS games (jump&run, arcade, adventures) quickly ended.
Seeing the memory of the lighthearted 8/16-Bit era fading slowly wasn't cool. This really saddened me. 😢
If it hadn't been for the Gameboy platform, I would have had probably left the gaming scene long ago.

On the positive side, the homebrew/do-it-you-self spirit later came back to life again (something good about the 2010s)! 😀
Fixing and building your own stuff, like common in the 70s to early 90s (remember construction kits), made a cameo.
Okay, instead of etching ISA cards or building radios we are rather working with Raspberry Pi
and tablets now, but it's better than nothing, I guess. 3D printers and flash media also have their place.

My three favourite are '99-'00, '05-'06 and around '08.

I love the first because those days have such a special place in my heart.

Me, too! 😁 That time was kinda magic. People were rather optimistic and everything seemed so hopeful.
It felt like a new era had just begun and all the bad stuff was history.

At the time my family also got a new computer (~750MHz+Win98) which seemed insanely
powerful in comparison to my trusty old 286@12MHz+DOS6.2/Win 3.1.

It was also about the time I discovered the then-new and wonderful world of pocket computers (Palm m100 ?).
In principle, it was like a prior smartphone era without things beeing "smart" (except for the user) and a "phone".
Perhaps that's why I'm not so impressed by that current fad. By 2000, the Nokia Communicator was already available for years.

Btw, I remember, one random cartoon show which my sister used to watch at the time even made fun of a 486 notebook
(a character was stating a stone panel would be better suited for desktop publishing than a 486).
To me, this was a baffling experience, since it previously was about the newest tech we had at home (my dad still had kept a 386 for business tasks).

I've been gaming since the days of the XTs and XT-compatibles. (Actually, even before that with pong machine.)

I seem to have a bi-phasic fondness :

1. During my 286 era = many, many classic DOS games came out when I had my 286 - AD&D Gold Box games, Microprose's simulations, Sierra's quest adventures, Monkey Island, Wing Commander, Lemmings, GODS, etc...

This was also the first time I ever had a sound card - the Sound Blaster 1.5, complete in it's box.

2. The second phase is during my Pentium 1 era DOS/Win3.x Multimedia PC (MPC) explosion with CD-ROM based titles started appearing. In addition to "enhanced CD-ROM versions" of my favourite adventure games, there were many interesting games and multimedia software that made my Pentium 133 + SB32PnP+6X CD-ROM era, an unforgettable experience. Not to mention some classic Windows 95 games that appeared during this period too.

I currently have three permanent classic systems - 486DX2-66(DOS 6.22 + Win3.1), Pentium II 400 (DOS,Win3.11 & Win95c) and Pentium 4 3.6GHz (Win98SE), in addition to my main modern desktop and laptops. But most of the time, I'm just using 86Box and Dosbox nowadays.

I've been thinking about it 2 days, and I think I narrowed it down, I'd say 1974 to 2013, I mean screw the 1830s, Babbage really only had a fraction of his analytical engine built and Lovelace didn't pull her finger out and write any good games. The 50s and 60s were all about big iron, and only DEC made anything interesting. Then since 2013 has been boring until Ryzen came out, still waiting to see if this is going to be epic toe to toe slugging match or just kinda 1995, meh, we have a dx4, you have a dx4..

Haha, a version of Lunar Lander was around in the 1950s IIRC.

At one time, computers themselves were the 'game'.

I like DEC systems too

Their Pentium-based Celebris/Digital PC/Personal Workstation series that's ignored by history that is. While everyone's all "packard bell computer best ever spiderman maker pc 90's nostalgia retro" these refined expensive professional DEC grayboxes have their history revised out to the point where not even support archives survived.

I will probably end up saying the '90s as a whole as I've really been enjoying games that I missed out on like Wing Commander, Might and Magic and the early Elder Scrolls games. I think it might be harder for me to find games I enjoy from the 80s but so far I've really enjoyed the Sierra AGIs and the first two Might and Magic games. I'm not sure if I could get into Bard's Tale though as I hear it is super grindy.... not that MM wasn't but there were a lot of sidequests, puzzles and exploration to distract. Maybe the earlier Ultima games as I haven't played any of them aside from a frustrating hour or so trying to play Ascension upon its broken release.

I have a list of games I've been collecting on GOG sales I am excited to play for the first that I'm sure would inspire envy.

Bitter end of the DOS era. Everyting old was old and cheap, not "retro" and expensive.
But hard drives were bigger. CD-Burners were affordable.

And the last 15 years i have the same formula for retro.
ISA based motherboard.
CD/DVD burner.
Largest and most modern hard drive that the motherboard bios can detect and use.

But in reality the most ipressionable years were the 486/Pentium years. But if you have a 250MB hard drive, then you have to make a permanent choice, bunch on dos games, or windows 95 and really nothing more. So no multiboot, or no large game collections.

As a user I'd say the golden era of PC (and Amiga) Gaming, from around 1990 to 1995. In the mid 90's we got those awful FMV and terrible looking 3D games that really turned me off. It wasn't until Half-Life that I really got into gaming again. As a collector I feel the best years were in the early 00's when most people were ditching their old hardware for cheap and affordable internet machines. I have found a few late 80's and early 90's gems in the past few years, but I mostly missed the best collecting era by quite a few years and that somewhat bothers me. Same goes with the games and software. I know a local store was still selling a lot of early 90's new old stock as late as 2005-2010, but I only heard of it in autumn 2011 when I bought the rest of it, although most of the good stuff was already gone. 😢