Amazing, I didn't know this existed! I started using Rails about 1 year later.
After writing web apps with Java servlets (and liking it), rails new and rails generate felt like pure magic.
If anyone is interested, I built a git-history explorer for rails here (with a focus on the people involved). It starts with the first svn commit on Nov. 24th 2004.
GitHubInitial · rails/rails@db045dbgit-svn-id: http://svn-commit.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk@4 5ecf4fe2-1ee6-0310-87b1-e25e094e27de↗ github.com