Much more documentation

1 files changed, 22 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/doc/intro.rst b/doc/intro.rst
index cc89a19..14d0177 100644
--- a/doc/intro.rst
+++ b/doc/intro.rst
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-Introduction
+Introduction & history
 ==================================================
 
 Python-RSA's history starts in 2006. As a student assignment for the
@@ -6,7 +6,8 @@ University of Amsterdam we wrote a RSA implementation. We chose Python
 for various reasons; one of the most important reasons was the
 `unlimited precision integer`_ support.
 
-.. _`unlimited precision integer`: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-long-complex
+.. _`unlimited precision integer`:
+    http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-long-complex
 
 It started out as just a module for calculating large primes, and RSA
 encryption, decryption, signing and verification using those large
@@ -14,6 +15,24 @@ numbers. It also included generating public and private keys. There
 was no functionality for working with byte sequences (such as files)
 yet.
 
-.. todo:: write more history
+Version 1.0 did include support for byte sequences, but quite clunky,
+mostly because it didn't support 0-bytes and thus was unsuitable for
+binary messages.
+
+Version 2.0 introduced a lot of improvements by Barry Mead, but still
+wasn't compatible with other RSA implementations and used no random
+padding.
+
+Version 3.0 introduced PKCS#1 v1.5 functionality, which resulted in
+compatibility with OpenSSL and many others implementing the same
+standard. Random padding was introduced that considerably increased
+security, which also resulted in the ability to encrypt and decrypt
+binary messages.
+
+Key generation was also improved in version 3.0, ensuring that you
+really get the number of bits you asked for. At the same time key
+generation speed was greatly improved. The ability to save and load
+public and private keys in PEM and DER format as also added.
+