Dr. Dobb's Journal – Vol 1 (1976)
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[1] Compared to the domestic UK magazines that were available at the time: Computer Shopper. Personal Computer World, etc.
All that said, the US magazines did not have the late, great Wilf Hey.. and we did :-)
Dr. Dobb's had an incredible run of relevancy, from the 70's through the 90's.
Possibly A. K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" and "Mathematical Recreations" column [1]? I think it was the first place I came across CAs and the concept of computer viruses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Dewdney#Computing,_mathe...
For so many other magazines I only have a vague notion of the magazine as a whole, or long-running features, but it otherwise all blurs together in a vague mass of nostalgia.
If anything it was Computer Shopper that was the end of most of the other computer magazines.
> "Dr. Dobb’s Journal of COMPUTER Calisthenics & Orthodontia"
subtitle Running Light Without Overbyte
... oh, was it? ISTR that the "overbyte" thing was because of/in reference to the picture of Kirk Douglas(?) showing off their choppers, and didn't make the connection (all those years ago)
It's a relatively light abstraction layer over what the computer can do, plus some I/O functions.
Byte Magazine
Wired before it got taken over by Wedding Bells Magazine, and overrun with consumer porn.
And to a much lesser extent, PC Magazine and PC World, which were read principally for the ads.
These are the organs that formed computer culture in the golden age of computers. But more than any of the others, DDJ.
But Chaos Manor/Jerry Pournelle was always fun.
DDJ was just affirmational, “here is some knowledge” “here is how I built <x>” there is an innocence to it. You might ignore it, that knowledge might alter your career. It was a neat magazine of people doing cool stuff in areas I’m interested without the baggage. Just possibilities.
Hard or impossible to replace with that scale today.
In the 70s through the mid 90s, before the WWW v1.0 bubble taught the world you could get rich quick in software, there was a greater appetite to, say, take your time working your way through an article on a new technique in C. Now the vast majority of people just want copy/paste Python code examples from Stack Overflow. At most they may suffer through a brief video tutorial.
Part of this is not some “kids these days” sort of reason, but the reality that most code is much more short lived than ever before.
Sadly several moves ended up with me throwing them into the recycle bin, only keep the ones that were kind of top value to me and able to fit into a single box.
Have long learned that keeping stuff just for sentimental value isn't worth the extra space, and I own the DVD copies anyway.
Maybe I should have kept them to sell on ebay or something.
I learned so much reading Dr. Dobbs while growing up. I'd probably understand a third of the content at max, and many things I read didn't really "click" until much years later. But it was still very formative for me, and remember with fond memories several of the articles. I still have a box full of them somewhere.
It's a shame it didn't survive the internet era.
There was a time when one would have been in mortal danger of having cabinets containing 3.75MB worth of storage tip over onto one; these days 1TB could fall on one's head without effect, but may instead be a choking hazard.
I like to point out that Johnny Mnemonic would have seemed a whole lot different today, when he could have transported "all" that data in his head without damaging his brain by stuffing a microsd card up his nose instead (or any number of other places).