Madge Networks sold Token Ring smart NICs in the early 1990s. We had a significant chunk of the Novell and Microsoft LAN protocols on the card in 1992/93 and TCP/IP was put on a year or so later. The main driver for this was freeing up MS/DOS system memory but it probably also helped with performance, particularly with some of the weird laptop connectivity mechanisms that were used before PCMCIA became a thing
I would argue that Smart-NICs go back earlier than 1998. At Meiko we had a SPARC processor in our NIC (which was cache-coherent with the main CPU and performed safe RDMA from user-space with no need for a system call, or page locking) in the early 1990s (LLNL had a 256 node machine in 1994) See https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-8191(94)90025-6
Madge Networks sold Token Ring smart NICs in the early 1990s. We had a significant chunk of the Novell and Microsoft LAN protocols on the card in 1992/93 and TCP/IP was put on a year or so later. The main driver for this was freeing up MS/DOS system memory but it probably also helped with performance, particularly with some of the weird laptop connectivity mechanisms that were used before PCMCIA became a thing
I would argue that Smart-NICs go back earlier than 1998. At Meiko we had a SPARC processor in our NIC (which was cache-coherent with the main CPU and performed safe RDMA from user-space with no need for a system call, or page locking) in the early 1990s (LLNL had a 256 node machine in 1994) See https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-8191(94)90025-6