If I where nostalgic about Rails and everything surrounding it I would probably say things like:

I remember when:

• …More than 100 users in #rubyonrails was considered “crazy lots”.
• …When I had no idea how nice and speedy Lighttpd really was.
• …When TextDrive was the only host support Rails and FastCGI.
• …When we didn’t have fancy stuff such as a unified ActiveRecord::Base#find method and dynamic finders.
• …When we didn’t have any way to cache things easily.
• …When there was that bug with has_and_belongs_to_many inserting records twice in the join table.
• …When we had to restart our fastcgi servers in development mode to reload changes.
• …When ActionPack didn’t cache the compiled ERb templates
• …When we didn’t have Routes to make up some lovely clean urls as we saw fit.
• …When there was no built-in way to generate HTML tags programmatically.
• …When Basecamp and 43things was the biggest Rails applications.
• …When we had to write all our model validations without the validates_* methods.
• …When we had to write RSS feeds using plain old rhtml instead of dead-easy Builder integration.
• …When I downloaded every single Rails application and pasted every code snippet into ~/Desktop/Rails I came across, just to see how they’ve done things.
• …When using cookies was really slow.
• …When we had to use foo.add_to_bars(baz) instead of foo.bars << baz.
• …When we didn’t have ActionMailer.
• …When no-one knew what the term ajax was, or had any way of easily using xmlhttprequest and friends.
• …When ApplicationController was called AbstractApplicationController.
• …When models and helpers didn’t load themselves “automagically”.
• …When almost no-one apart from DHH made a living out of coding Rails all day long.

…And we still had to wade through 12 meters of snow just get to work in our PHP/Java/Perl/whatever shops

Boy, has Rails come a long way since I started playing around with Rails in september 2004. And with the infamous 1.0 just around the corner, the future still looks just as bright.