Even now, some large traditional sites put static public IPs on workstations. When I was a lbl.gov, you got a (minimally firewalled) public ip via dhcp, and the hostname sent by your workstation was used to create a dns record of foo.dhcp.lbl.gov. You could request a static address for your host, and you'd be assigned an even less firewalled ip along with a foo.lbl.gov record.

A decade later this still seems to be at least partly in place, as I'm able to browse the webserver running on an old colleague's desktop.