Engineering Memory of the Month

Cryptographers pose for photographers

Back in 1977, the nation was mad about "Saturday Night Fever," Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, and … Public Key Cryptography?

The revolutionary, Stanford-born advance in computer data security did indeed attract the attention of national media. Time magazine covered the invention and ran this November 1977 Stanford News Service photo to illustrate the story.

In the picture (from left) are Ralph Merkle, Martin Hellman, and Whit Diffie. Merkle and Diffie were Hellman’s students at Stanford at the time. The three are credited as the first to publish a PKC system, which allows people and businesses to share information over a public network without fear of eavesdropping along the way. Hellman, now a professor emeritus of electrical engineering, shared this picture with us and unlocked its key secret: The printout has absolutely nothing to do with the research and the photo was thoroughly posed. Says Hellman, "Our work was done mostly with paper and pencil, a programmable calculator, and a computer terminal, none of which made for high interest in a picture."

We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you’d like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein, manager, Communications and P.R.