The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.[18][19] Subsequently three more versions of Ruby were released in two days.[14] The release coincided with the launch of the Japanese-language ruby-list mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language.
Already present at this stage of development were many of the features familiar in later releases of Ruby, including object-oriented design, classes with inheritance, mixins, iterators, closures, exception handling and garbage collection.[20]