@VernonDozier: What the hell am I reading?
So RSA was born as a commercial product, that used some of the PGP technology.
Wrong. RSA was sitting on its patents and unable to monetize the stuff properly (not to mention being hindered by ITAR and COCOM.)
Zimmermann wanted to use the RSA algorithm in PGP. But it was patented. So he finagled the fact that basically someone at RSA said over a beer that he could build an implementation. (Building an implementation is not hard to do; we did it at school). Then someone exported the code as a printout to Norway and Finland to be "legally in the right" about that as I remember. End of story.
These were interesting times. Also the times when Clinton wanted to get into your phone via Clipper chip and "key escrow" retardation.
I remember reading an article in Scientific American from the early 1990s, where IBM said they had the technology to develop CPUs that run up to 4GHz using RISC technology
Must have been very simple CPUs (like, a few trransistors) using experimental GaAs or Josephon Junctions. "We are doing it in the lab" is not "You can have it at the retailer".
Parallel processing makes it more difficult to brute-force decrypt.
LOLWHAT. Brute-force decryption is "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
My guess is that computer speeds plateaued as a result of Government intervention
Time for bed, Mulder!!
See also: RSA Company History
See also: PGP history