# Ruby 0.95

> Ruby's first public release, shared to a Japanese newsgroup two days before Christmas 1995.

- December 21, 1995: Ruby 0.95, the first public release

Ruby's first public release was version **0.95**, distributed on **December 21, 1995** to `fj.sources`, one of the Japanese Usenet newsgroups (the "fj" hierarchy stands for "from Japan"). This was the language's public birth, roughly two years after [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md) settled on the name and started building it ([Ruby was named before it existed](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/named-before-it-existed.md)).

The "0.95" is just a version number below 1.0, marking it as an early, pre-1.0 build rather than a finished one. The first release Matz numbered **1.0** followed a year later, on Christmas Day 1996 ([Ruby 1.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-1-0.md)).

*Related:* [Ruby was named before it existed](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/named-before-it-existed.md) · [Ruby 1.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-1-0.md) · [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md)

## Sources
- Ruby history chronology (release log, entry for 1995-12-21, "ruby 0.95 distributed on fj.sources"): https://github.com/takahashim/ruby-history
- Ruby (programming language), Wikipedia (first public release of Ruby 0.95 announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on 21 December 1995): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-0-95/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)