Vigenère through Shannon to planck — a short history of electronic cryptographic systems

The history of cryptography goes right back to ancient times but modern electronic coding for secrecy essentially uses similar principles for poly-alphabetic ciphers and their variants; recent algorithm developments are based on the rules of secrecy as enunciated by Claude Shannon in the late 1940’s; many of these schemes are published as standards. We now have public-key systems, and quantum cryptography is now beginning to emerge from the research laboratories.