But not to encrypt the communication -- that would have been, apparently, against the U.S. laws of that time.
> Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.
It's surely the "interference" in the form of the mentioned U.S. laws at the time, some other comments here detail the historical background.
However, export was another matter and the export version of the 7800 left the crypto out!
In any case, my point was that weak crypto spanning into the late 90s was not a result of technical limitations.
The laws as they were had exactly that effect: a lot of companies didn’t intend to have products sold solely in the US. And it was problematic enough that most companies avoided making a US-only version: even carrying such a product on a floppy disk while travelling outside of US could get you in trouble, see this article from 1995:
https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing-investigation-o...
The companies that did use strong crypto typically had the contracts with the military.
I think both of us might be making the error of correcting something the other person wasn't intending to comment on! :)
Some export complications around crypto exist to this very day-- at least for commercial hardware products. I've had to fill out the export forms myself, and not that many years ago.
Fun fact: The Atari 7800, designed in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games. Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.