Which computer era would have been the most exciting to take part in?

1995 - 2002 was the good old time, everything was new and challenging. Also less spam and my favorite IRC lol :) I met ton of interesting people back then that would have been impossible to meet today. I started my journey as a video game publisher and later around 2000 did start one of the first mobile pocketpc / palmOS game publisher, those were exciting times!

Personally it has to be the 2160s when they invented time travel. Classic

My first experiences with computers was with the Apple ][+ so I almost got in on the ground floor. Still, I would have loved to have been in the Homebrew Computer Club back in the day when Woz introduced the Apple I.

Hackers by Steven Levy was an important book that I read as a kid, several times. Because I could relate.

This one, technology is always getting better. The best time to be alive is objectively the present.

In the Svelte era :D

I'd love to go back to the computing of the 40s and 50s. As a female developer (and a young one at that), I would love to see the humble beginnings of the industry I love so much. It's the sort of thing you can only learn about through museums and pictures these days. Unlike how I came upon my first Atari, it's not the sort of tech you can pull out from under your dad's bed.
Plus, it was completely pivotal in the development of the computing industry. Not to mention the women that programmed them have all but been forgotten about. Jean Jennings Bartik; Grace Hopper. Feminist icons. I'd love to meet them all and just revel in their genius. Systems like ENIAC paved the way for modern coders and to see it face-to-face would personally make me feel the same way I did seeing the giant dinosaur skeleton in the foyer of the Natural History Museum.

The lover-of-space in me would have loved to have been a part of NASA's first space exploration missions. The maths, physics involved is insane.

Btw, NASA is on Github 👀

I think the most exciting time was the early 1990s. I wish I took part in it, or at least was more a part of it, and had learned more things sooner.

This was when the Internet was a thing and the Web wasn't. When spam and advertising were virtually synonymous. Usenet was the most interesting thing online (although Archie and IRC and some other things were also interesting). Usenet had a holographic quality to it, in that there was a copy of it in thousands of /usr/spool/news directories. That made it very hard to fake message traffic and impossible to erase it. Add to that the fact that there was no entity that could be identified as the owner of Usenet itself, and you have something the world had never before seen. I had seen talk radio, amateur radio, even BBS systems, but Usenet had multi-continent reach, effectively zero censorship, effectively zero advertising, ran on free software. It was obviously government subsidized, the Internet itself having been a DARPA project, and the bulk of Usenet traffic coming from .edu domains, so I had grave doubts about the magic of the Internet being able to survive privatization. In hindsight, I can only say my doubts were not nearly grave enough.

Probably the now era since it's the least racist time for the industry. But it's still pretty racist. PoC can't mess with time machines.