[Nrsolis]

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)."

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

[dlitz]

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.