Well I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.
I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.
