The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999,[1] Nieuwegein), an electronics engineer from the Netherlands.
[2] Several demonstrations of his coding system convinced high-profile investors to join his company, but a few days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack.
The source code was never recovered, the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified, and the playback device he used for demonstrations was found to have contained a hard disk drive, contrary to what he told investors.
Software engineer Adam Gordon Bell postulates that Sloot may have believed in his idea because he failed to fully understand its mathematical limits, and thinking he simply needed to refine the code, he faked the demonstrations.
This concept was the motivation to develop alternative data storage techniques that would require significantly less space than traditional methods.
[3] In 1995, Sloot claimed to have developed a data encoding technique that could store an entire feature film in only 8 kilobytes (8192 bytes).
[6][better source needed] As of 2022[update], the plain text of the Dutch Wikipedia page describing the film Casablanca occupies 29,000 bytes.
More than fit in a number of one kilobyte, I can tell you.In 1996, Sloot received an investment from colleague Jos van Rossum, a cigarette machine operator.
Pieper resigned from Philips in May 1999 and joined Sloot's company as CEO, which was re-branded as The Fifth Force, Inc.[1] The story — including an account of a demonstration in which Sloot apparently recorded and replayed a randomly selected 20-minute cooking program on a single smartcard — is told in modest detail in Tom Perkins' 2007 book Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins.
[10] Perkins and Pieper would have proceeded after Sloot's death, but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk,[10] had disappeared and, despite months of searching, was never recovered.
Despite Sloot's claim that his coding system stored all of its data on smart cards, his demonstration device was found to contain a hard disk.