I assumed he picked it up from e-waste

Because www is just a subdomain. It can be anything. it could be “mail.site.com”, “xxx.site.com”, “home.site.com”, “wwwwwwwww.site.com” etc. The www subdomain is just what most people used to point to where their world wide web site html files were held back in the day. The rest of the domain was used for other things.