Just a little correction per IPv4 wikipedia [1]: Introduction 1981; 44 years ago

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

I was going to look up the same... I thought it was a little older than that... it's worth remembering that in 1981 there was no DNS yet, and even for dialup BBSes there were only a handful in the entire country as Hayes modems were new that year. Hell, for years a lot of business email services were dialup, grab packets, send packets and read/reply offline.

This is the same year the IBM PC was first released, and many people felt that would only see fairly limited sales. It wound up selling over 20x projections.

Nobody at the time really thought there would be a need for even more addresses. Not to mention the additional overhead of a wider network on the hardware at the time.