…surely I have missed a lot of things. Can folks share some interesting/unusual sites they’ve discovered, sort of off the beaten track type of things, any topic at all? I’ll start with this site, been around for a long time, that carries all kinds of weird and interesting devices. https://www.amazing1.com/ One other site I visit 2-3 times/week is: https://phys.org/
Here's a snapshot of the first Internet webpage and, tongue in cheek, here is the end of the Internet.
I don't think it was, insofar as that was a rule or a policy, but most early Internet users had disdain for profit-making ventures on the Internet. Even advertising was frowned upon. I was an early meta editor for the Open Directory Project and, for the first several years, we didn't list sites that had ads.