Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The foundation of two pioneering Usenet newsgroups in astrophysics - still existent today - and some of the main milestones in their history have been tracked from the origins at Princeton University in 1983 to 1994. To this aim, in line with authoritative recommendations from the discipline of web history, different kinds of sources have been retrieved and combined: mainly, online archives of Usenet newsgroups and human sources. The latter have included on one side the kind contribution provided by four astrophysicists, two of which had a role in the maintaining of these newsgroups, through individual interviews; on the other side that from the sixty-seven researchers who answered a purpose-built questionnaire submitted within the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in May 2023.
Monica Marra (Sat,) studied this question.