Since Dr. Dobb's has some amount of brand recognition, would it be possible to capitalize on that? For example, maybe come out with a line of authoritative technical books that are Dr. Dobb's branded, that would end up having the same recognition as O'reilly's nutshell books? Then the website / magazine would end up functioning as a loss leader to promote the book series (or other ventures).
I wonder how much brand recognition Dr. Dobb's really has though. I certainly grew up with it, but how many 20 year old programmers even really know what Dr. Dobb's is, let alone have a strong positive association with the brand?
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?
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.
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)
