Introduction
==================================================

Python-RSA's history starts in 2006. As a student assignment for the
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

It started out as just a module for calculating large primes, and RSA
encryption, decryption, signing and verification using those large
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