Essentially yes. I don’t know how much of the designs but weight driven and earlier water driven clocks existed.

Quartz? Quartz clocks are about 100 years old. You make it sound ljke we went from sundials to Casios lol. Mechanical clocks are around 1800 years old. Pendulum clocks around 500 years old and spring mechanical slightly younger.

Sorry I read “hopefully” as an imperative. At least in the US static home IPs are very rare so I generally assume some form of DDNS will be needed for any home hosting solution

Or just a dynamics dns service like duckdns. Point a CNAME at your duckdns name. Or better still, a cron running locally and updating cloudflare dns etc. Lots of better options for home hosting than hoping your ip stays static.