Farewell, Dr. Dobb's

[gslick]

After 38 years of glory, the long run of Dr. Dobb's has come to an end.
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-dobbs/240169421

At least they lasted in some form a lot longer than Byte and other magazines from that time frame did. The first issues of Dr. Dobb's I read were back in the mid 70's when I got a couple of them along with a KIM-1 from a friend of my dad. I didn't understand too much of what I was reading at the time.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Sad, that--but I could see it coming. I remember when DDJ swallowed up PC Tech Journal->"Windows/DOS developer Journal->Windows Developer Journal) in order to save a sister publication. Noble effort, but you could see the downhill slide. Microcomputing, Kilobaud, Midnight Engineering... all good publications. Heck, even trade rags like EDN or Electronic design look more like pamphlets than magazines nowadays. I'm surprised that DDJ lasted as long as it did.

 

[Unknown_K]

Quite a few tech magazines turned into nothing but glossy advertisements for a few large venders and a small intro from the publisher. Journalism in general kind of sucks these days no matter what media is used.

 

[billdeg]

My first reaction was "Dr Dobbs is still around?" I have the first five or so years printed copies of Dr. Dobbs and I use them from time to time to solve problems with vintage computers. That said, as a modern programmer for my day job Dr. Dobbs never came up in searches for problems I was trying to solve. The forums like StackOverflow are more likely to have the code or process fix I am looking for when stuck. Somewhere along the line they lost the upper-hand as a resource for general programming. I program in PHP, Java, C#, ColdFusion, etc. You would think Dobbs would have come up occasionally in searches and forums if they were still doing what they used to - useful coder support.

Personally I think this kind of resource was most useful pre-WWW. It's a real testament to the online site that they stuck around as long as they did given the "organic competition" of the open-source community forum-led and wiki-led WWW.