It's hardly a canonical source, but very much on the 'seemingly magical' side of things -- there's a Twitter account devoted to crawling old boards and pages and tweeting interesting snippets.

https://twitter.com/wwwtxt

Incredibly wonderful -- and very surreal. It's bizarre to think that only twenty years ago, the Internet was an entirely different culture.

In 1994, someone at Wired magazine (which was only in its 2nd year of existence) registered mcdonalds.com to see what would happen: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html

Google 'NSF NSI contract 1993'. Ended up being worth North of $20B in about 7 years.