The foundation of two very early Usenet newsgroups in astrophysics, still existent today, and some milestones in their history have been tracked from the origins at Princeton University in 1983 to 1994. They result to be pioneering experiences in this discipline, and among the earliest ones of this kind in academic disciplines at large. To the best of our knowledge, an account of their birth and evolution is given here for the first time, within the framework of some major steps in the evolution of Usenet newsgroups, one of the early Internet networks.
Following key recommendations from the recent discipline of web history, this research has combined multiple and different type sources, building mainly on online archives of Usenet newsgroups and on human contributions from the concerned scholarly community. A final overview is proposed on how these early online communication tools have been perceived and used by the scholarly community involved.
This research reconstructs computer-mediated communication experiences which were at risk of being forgotten; provides a view of this environment’s uptake of new communication technology; and contributes knowledge of some social dynamics of the astrophysics community in the last twenty years of the twentieth century.
With a Preface by Dr. Phillip Helbig