Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto and first publicly released in 1995.
Yukihiro Matsumoto, often called Matz, began designing Ruby in Japan in the early 1990s. He wanted a language that combined object-oriented programming with features he appreciated in Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp. Ruby was first made publicly available on December 21, 1995.
Ruby treats everything as an object and emphasizes programmer happiness and expressive syntax. Its later international popularity was strongly boosted by Ruby on Rails, a web application framework released in 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Ruby and Ruby on Rails are not the same thing. Ruby is the programming language; Rails is a framework built with Ruby. Ruby also has multiple implementations, including the standard MRI implementation, JRuby for the Java Virtual Machine, and TruffleRuby. Its language versions are commonly identified as Ruby 1.8, 1.9, 2.x, and 3.x.