I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time. But I am starting to fall out of nostalgia for the NES which is held dearly in a lot of hearts of retro gamers and gamers that have enjoyed what that system had to offer for a few decades.
I know it had offered a lot of classics and gave so many games their start, most of which are still with us today like Final Fantasy for example.
The best guess I can give about why I don’t care as much about that generation is because it is very oversaturated when you start entering the world of retro gaming. For retro gaming I prefer SNES and Genesis, because I technically did start playing those when I was born and they were first released. So I have more favorability towards those than the NES and generations before and during it.
PC gaming is kind of a continuum to me. I can draw hard lines at DOS > Windows and Win9x > NT-based Windows a la XP where compatibility mostly or partially breaks but you can play a lot of games made since the Steam era on modern hardware without much fuss.
Consoles really define the “generations,” and the only console generation I’m really nostalgic for is the SNES era. Mine was always a Nintendo household, and the SNES was my childhood. I had an N64, I’ve gone back to play it, I’m not sure even Ocarina of Time holds up anymore. The thing I still clutch to from the N64 era is the music. The SNES though, sometimes I want to go back and play those old games.