Dr Dobb's Journal, 1976 - 2009

Software Engineering

Books

Back in the golden days of computer magazines (I’m talking the mid-80’s to mid-90’s), I could spend ages in the newsagent browsing all the different available issues. You remember – when the US PC Magazine was as big as a phone book, and it seemed like every brand of computer had their own magazines – BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, MicroBee and the rest. One particular periodical that caught my eye was Dr Dobb’s Journal (DDJ for short) – probably because it wasn’t so much aligned with a particular brand, but that it was about computer programming in general.

Photo of the cover of Dr Dobbs Journal issue #162 March 1990

The first issue I bought was March 1990, which had an assembly language theme. For old times sake, let’s take a trip down memory lane and see what those 160 pages included. Descriptions are as printed on the contents page.

The following feature articles:

the following columns:

plus the following:

Wow! A bit of a blast from the past! At $AU5.95 it wasn’t the cheapest thing on the shelf, but you certainly got your money’s worth. And yes folks, that’s THE Tim Paterson.

A few years later I started to subscribe and began my collection. What I’ve really enjoyed was the variety of articles. Whilst there was almost always something of direct relevance, it was the exposure to other languages, hardware platforms and specialty areas that I really liked. And you never know when sometimes something might actually be useful in your own field too.

Here’s almost all of my collection that I’ve accumulated over the years. Funny how other magazines and journals dated quickly and weren’t that hard to throw out, but I always felt that inside most issues there’d be something, if not timeless then at least worth keeping around for a while yet.

Photo of lots of magazines on a shelf

So the years passed, some things changed, but DDJ continued on. I did notice some differences – the page count slowly dropped, some of the columnists changed or finished, but Jonathan continued to be the editor and Michael’s “Swaine’s Flames” continued to be on the last page. Actually now that I look more closely, it does look like Jonathan and Michael ended up carrying most of the work towards the end.

I’d previously seen the same happen to BYTE magazine (to which I’d also subscribed to until its demise just over 10 years ago), and I suspected DDJ was heading in the same direction. February 2009 and my fears were confirmed by Jonathan Erickson’s editorial – DDJ’s time had finished, it was to become a monthly insert to Information Week. Ironically I received the early-January edition of Information Week in late February (not that handy for a weekly publication to arrive that late!) and the DDJ inclusion turned out to be nothing more than a column written by Jonathan. Information Week is aimed at “IT professionals and business managers”. Somehow I don’t think they’re going to be running to many assembly language articles anymore.

Dr Dobbs magazine cover, issue #416

So let’s compare the final issue. From 160pages down to just 48. You can tell when a magazine or journal is getting smaller when they no longer print the title on the spine of the publication, because there isn’t a spine anymore (just staples). I’d guess the art budget must have also been slashed, as instead of clever/thought-provoking covers, for the last few issues we’ve been greeted with with photos of one of the subjects of the “Developer Diaries” page.

It contains the following feature articles:

the following columns:

plus the following:

Still some interesting stuff, but a shadow of its former self. Most of these articles are only one or two pages, contrasting with the detailed content from 1990. I see we also lost the “Letters” section at some stage. I reckon I finished reading the whole thing in 30 minutes.

I don’t know why it died, but you would have to guess that online media has a big part to play. There’s so much information online (a lot of rubbish, but some good quality too) that it’s probably hard for a paper-based medium that you’re charging customers for to compete against anything free. DDJ have been pushing their online content for a while, but

Farewell DDJ. Thanks for helping me be a better informed programmer. You’ll be missed.