Jan Sloot

Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999, Nieuwegein) was a Dutch electronics technician, who claimed to have developed a revolutionary data compression technique, the Sloot Digital Coding System, which could compress a complete movie down to 8 kilobytes of data— this is orders of magnitude greater compression than the best currently available technology as of April 2016.

Some informants say "It is not about compression. Everyone is mistaken about that. The principle can be compared with a concept as Adobe-postscript, where sender and receiver know what kind of data recipes can be transferred, without the data itself actually being sent."[1]

Despite the apparent impossibility of such a technique, there were investors that saw potential. However, Sloot died of a heart attack one day before an attractive deal was signed with Roel Pieper, former CTO and board member of Philips. The story - including an account of a believable demonstration of the technology - is told in modest detail in Tom Perkins' 2007 book, Valley Boy. Perkins, co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, had agreed to invest in the technology when Sloot died; Perkins and Pieper would have proceeded after Sloot's death, but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk, had disappeared and despite months of searching was never recovered.

References

  1. ↑ http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-1/More/CaptainCosmos/Not_Compression.htm#.U_wv03Wx15Q

External links

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