I remember the early Internet, before NAT. Everyone had public IPs everywhere. Most universities had public IPs on the desktop (and dorm room.) My home network was a /24 with no NAT. NAT was supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
My first Networking job (2012-2015) was still like that! It was a regional health system that had a /16 from the early 90s (pre-ARIN). We were still using public IPs on printers and guest networks even. It was a bit of a pain going to the next place with 10x the devices and 1/10th the IP space.
Funnily enough the first job with all public IPs was the one with some IPv6 deployed while the 2nd was the one without. Of course it was the same manager in the early 1990s that rolled out IPv4 there that rolled out IPv6 in the 2010s so maybe it's not so surprising.
