[jgale]

I guess 2004 was a crazy year for cryptography.

[pbsd]

Indeed it was. Wang's breakthrough work [1,2] broke most of the common hash functions at the time, and later also SHA-1 [3]. The SHA-3 competition was motivated by this streak of new successful attacks.

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/199

[2] http://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/archive/2005/EUROCRYPT/2868/286...

[3] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11535218_2

[ihsw]

It's the year 64-bit CPUs became consumer commodoties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#64-bit_process...