Dreamweaver was pretty nice (compared to the mess that Adobe GoLive was) and definitely close to what static site generators are doing today, just with a gui.
It was really awesome, when I discovered Dreamweavers dynamic templating, because at that time, I had no clue how to get PHP and MySQl to work. Now that I know everything about PHP and MySQL I have a hard time understanding node.js (beside grunt) etc.