Re: IP4ME
Global DNS has been available since around the mid '80s, and before then there were so few systems on the Internet that they could be held in a publicly available hosts.txt file, distributed from Stanford University.
Even now, you can use dotted IP addresses on the internet, or even just single integers (try using https://2398766906, I promise that you can ignore the self signed certificate error, and the only reason you may not want to end up there is if you dislike Google. I wanted to use 1746011158, but apparently Cloudflare do not allow connections using raw IP addresses - how the Internet has been controlled).
Only masochists or people hunting for the dark web (or maybe the Pirate Bay) would use IP addresses directly since forever unless you had a very inept sysadmin!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
