> It's 1998: hey, I can drastically speed up your web service, let's etch it right to silicon.

I distinctly remember 32-bit/33 MHz PCI accelerator cards for SSL being a real thing (for use on OpenBSD or FreeBSD), in an era when something like a single core 700 MHz Pentium 3 1U system was a relatively powerful individual bare metal httpd box.

http://www.aster.si/partnerji/compaq/atalla/axl200.html

The CPU load of doing a lot of SSL purely in software was a problem in terms of scaling things up, so this was one attempt at a (very short lived) solution. Note that this predated TLS1.0.