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.
The bet is the interesting part. In 1982, TCP/IP was what the ARPANET ran; OSI was what the standards bodies and several governments said the future would be. A company selling TCP/IP hardware to corporate buyers was taking a commercial position on an argument that would not be settled for six more years.
Offloading the stack onto the adapter is also a recurring idea rather than a period curiosity - it returns every time host processors fall behind link speeds, which they periodically do.