Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that great papers are always recognized. There's a lot more variety than that.
Some great papers are recognized in manuscript. Some are hailed within the year of their publication. Some are rejected because the reviewer is an archrival of the chairman of the author's department. Some are rejected because the author is of the wrong religion or ethnic group. Some are published to moderate applause and then forgotten about for thirty years, at which point someone accidentally finds them and realizes that the authors were decades ahead of their time. Some would have been immediately given prizes if their authors were half as good at writing as they were at thinking. Some are recognized as interesting, but people with a vested interest in a different viewpoint try to pretend they're not interesting for as long as possible. Some are universally recognized as true but the authors are burnt at the stake anyway...
History is more interesting than fiction. Fiction which doesn't find an audience simply disappears, so it must generally be believable, and it must not make its audience too uncomfortable. History is under no such constraints.
It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.
It would be VERY interesting to know if that's the case.
The meme of what seems to be a brilliant idea being pooh-pooh'ed by the then-current intelligentsia is almost as common as funny cat pictures with silly quotes.
"In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests that he received a C for this paper, although in a later interview he claims that he told a reporter, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C", while other tales suggest that his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be feasible. The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale)."
I'm pretty sure that nobody would have rejected the RSA paper with a note that argued that there was some 32-bit limit. If I've got my history correct, the Diffie-Hellman _New Directions in Cryptography_ paper had already been published, and it already used the same basic mathematical operation (exponentiation modulo a large number). Everyone knew that, sooner or later, a full public-key encryption algorithm would be found.
With respect to the RSA "rejection," I would add the impracticality in hindsight is known to be, why the hell would you want pretty good signatures on your email? A few moments thought, provides examples where one would rather that the bits at the end were not present.
Note that PKI offers two independent options:
- Encryption, by any entity (repudiable) against a well-known public key.
- Authentication, by a single entity (non-repudiable), using a secret private key.
I get the impression you're trying to say that there are times when a person would want some reasonably plausible claim at repudiation. THis is also available, and can benefit from PKI as well.
Historical irony is only fun if it's historical. Otherwise it's just fiction. It's easy to imagine a bunch of philistines who unfairly reject a piece of brilliant work. Indeed, plenty of academics imagine that every day. It's a cliché.