>By 1977, three members of this new community created a set of

algorithms that implemented the Diffie-Hellman scheme. Called RSA for

its founders—MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman—it offered

encryption that was likely to be stronger than the Data Encryption

Standard (DES), a government-approved alternative that does not use

public keys. The actual strength of key-based cryptographic systems

rests largely in the size of the key—in other words, how many bits of

information make up the key. The larger the key, the harder it is to

break the code. While DES, which was devised at IBM's research lab,

limits key size to 56 bits, RSA keys could be any size. (The trade-off

was that bigger keys are unwieldy, and RSA runs much more slowly than

DES.) But DES had an added burden: Rumors abounded that the NSA had

forced IBM to intentionally weaken the system so that the government

could break DES-encoded messages. RSA did not have that stigma. (The

NSA has denied these rumors.)

We have since learned that what became the RSA system started out by being invented by British GCHQ employee Clifford Cocks.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks    

"Clifford Christopher Cocks CB FRS (born 28 December 1950) is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In 1973, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he invented a public key cryptography algorithm equivalent to what would become (in 1978) the RSA algorithm.

The idea was classified information and his insight remained hidden for 24 years, despite being independently invented by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in 1977.^[4][5] Public-key cryptography using prime factorisation is now part of nearly every Internet transaction.^[6][7]

[end of quote from Wikipedia.]

I, Jim Bell, had my "Forrest Gump" moment, I believe during the first days of February 1977.  Very soon after my return to the MIT campus, I was walking through the hallways of Building 2, the Mathematics Department.  Posted, behind glass, were what I now believe was a statement of the RSA system. I think they had posted it in order to irrevocably make it no longer secret.

I suppose if I wanted to pump up my credentials, I could say that I immediately recognized the importance of this revelation.  Unfortunately, my reaction (if put into text) was far closer to "Huh???".

                Jim Bell