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Well I for one had no idea who or what Dr. Dobb's was before this submission.

• _nedR 12y ago
  Me neither. I am 25 and have never heard or come across this site through Google or any other way. Judging from the upvotes this article has, a lot of HN readers clearly know and care about this. I am curious as to what demographic, age-group, was drdobbs popular with. Was it something like Slashdot which was popular back in the day?
  • kayamon 12y ago
    There was once a time, back in the mists of history, when we had to print our websites out and buy them from newsagents.
  • dagw 12y ago
    In the 80's and early 90's Dr Dobbs was probably the eminent source of advanced programming knowledge, and a pretty huge influence on programmer culture in general. It was for example the place where the GNU manifesto was initially published, and many of the big name programmers of the day where regular contributors. It also published a number of fairly legendary article series where many of its readers got their first introduction to topics like operating system design or writing your own C compiler. So basically if you programmed in the 80's or 90's it was most likely a huge influence on you.
    • _nedR 12y ago
      Ah ok. I wonder whether they ever truly made the transition to the web, or how successful they were at attracting new readership or driving in search engine traffic.(I am basing this purely on the fact that I had never heard of them until now and that their website has never come up in search queries i make)