Yes, it is. A lot of old Dr Dobbs articles are like that; we're rather lucky they still exist and haven't vanished into the ether.

Yep. Looks like somebody put in <a> tags with names around all the paragraphs to target them with links, then somebody else put in css to manually underline all a tags, not just ones with href's.

In Chrome just Right Click => Inspect one of the paragraphs, then in the element tree select one of the a tags and un-check the "#content .story a" css rule. Then your eyes will stop burning!