Dr. Dobb's Journal

» see drdobbs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the print magazine never came anywhere near me. what reached me was drdobbs.com, the way most technical sites reached anyone in the 2000s, one article at a time out of a search result, with no particular sense that the article belonged to a publication that had been running since before i was born. i suspect that is how most of its last decade of readers arrived, and it turns out to be the thing that killed it.

the origin is one of the better stories in computing. in 1975 dennis allison wrote a series for the people's computer company newspaper describing how to build a stripped-down basic interpreter, small enough to fit the memory of a machine that cost real money per byte. he called it tiny basic and asked anyone who implemented it to mail their version in so copies could be sent to whoever wanted one. let us stand on each others' shoulders, he wrote, not each others' toes.

enough people did that the newsletter needed somewhere to put them. bob albrecht and allison started a publication intended to run for three issues, titled dr. dobb's journal of tiny basic calisthenics and orthodontia, with the subtitle running light without overbyte. dobbs was dennis and bob glued together. jim warren came in as the first editor, dropped tiny basic from the masthead before issue one shipped in january 1976, and it kept going for thirty-eight years.

the timing is not accidental. a month after the first issue, bill gates published his open letter to hobbyists complaining that people were copying altair basic instead of paying for it. dr. dobb's already existed, in the most literal sense available, to hand out a basic interpreter for free.

~ the case file ~

~ the postmortem ~

the magazine was sold out of the nonprofit early and spent the rest of its life inside publishing companies, ending up under ubm by way of miller freeman and cmp. circulation ran around a hundred and twenty thousand. in january 2009 the editor announced that monthly print was finished, and the february 2009 issue was the last one on paper. after that it was a website with a monthly pdf hanging off it.

on 16 december 2014 andrew binstock posted a piece titled farewell, dr. dobb's, opening with the line that after thirty-eight years of glory the long run had come to an end. the reason he gave was specific and it was not readership. traffic had been growing. revenue had fallen to somewhere around thirty percent of what it was when he took the job, because over the previous eighteen months advertisers had worked out that website banners did not do what they had been paying for. no new articles went up after the end of that month.

~ what got buried with it ~

the archive was supposed to stay online and did, for a while. drdobbs.com does not resolve in 2026. there is no parking page and no redirect to an owner's other properties, which is what usually happens to a brand this old. the dns record is simply gone, so thirty-eight years of source code listings now exist at whatever addresses the internet archive assigned them.

what the magazine represented is harder to replace than the archive. it was written on the assumption that its reader wanted the actual code, not a description of the code, and that assumption held from the tiny basic listings all the way out to the last year of the website. the stack overflow answer that solves your problem in four lines is a better tool and a worse teacher, and there is no version of the trade that supports a hundred and twenty thousand subscribers anymore.

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