Vendor lineage
Excelan - TCP/IP on a card, before it was obvious
Selling TCP/IP to corporations in 1982, which required believing a research network's protocol had a commercial future.
Excelan built network interface cards that ran the TCP/IP stack on the card itself, offloading it from a host processor that in the early 1980s could ill afford the work. Founded in 1982 and merged into Novell in 1989, its whole existence sits inside the window when it was not yet obvious which protocol suite enterprises would standardise on.
Excelan built TCP/IP networking boards and software for workstations and PCs at a time when that combination was unusual - most local networking of the era was proprietary, and TCP/IP was still largely a research and government protocol rather than an office one. Selling it commercially meant betting that the protocol the universities used would become the protocol businesses used.
The bet was correct and the company did not get to collect on it alone. Novell acquired Excelan in 1989, reported by the New York Times on 24 March and the Los Angeles Times three days later, and folded the technology into a company whose own networking stack was IPX rather than IP.
That is the part worth sitting with. Novell dominated local networking in the early 1990s with a protocol of its own design, and its response to TCP/IP was to buy expertise rather than to build it - which bought time and not a position, because the protocol that won was the one nobody owned. The acquisition looks shrewd in 1989 and looks like a hedge against the future in hindsight, and it was both.