Computer Science
- February 16 – The first computer bulletin board system is created (CBBS in Chicago, Illinois).
- The RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography, based on the factoring problem, is first publicly described by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.
Read more about this topic: 1978 In Science
Famous quotes containing the words computer and/or science:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)