HISTORY OF CODING: The American mathematician Claude E. Shannon(1916- 2001 ), who worked at the Bell laboratories, published a paper in 1948 that described a mathematical theory of communication and thereby founded the field of information theory. Shortly thereafter, Richard Hamming and his colleagues at Bell laboratories laid the foundations for error-correcting codes. During the first half of the twentieth century, most of the work in cryptography was carried out by and for the military. In 1949, Shannon published the paper " The Communication Theory Of Secrecy Systems " , which broke new ground in the field of cryptography. The field was dormant until 1957, when two researchers at Stanford University discovered public key cryptology , which resulted in a burst of activity in this area. In 1976, three researchers at M.I.T. discovered a public key crypto system,known as the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adelman ) systems, which was widely used. Today, the