Jan Sloot

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Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen—11 July 1999^{[citation needed]}, 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 January 2013.

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."

Despite the ostensible 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.

External links

Broadband applications on limited bandwidth networks (PDF) - see section 3.1.5, "Beyond the limits?"
"The Stick of Jan Sloot," article on Sloot's claims by Pieter Spronck from Tilburg University
Dutch Website describing the story of Jan Sloot

Persondata
Name	Sloot, Jan
Alternative names
Short description	Dutch computer scientst
Date of birth	1945
Place of birth
Date of death	1999
Place of death

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