In 1995, a Dutch television repairman named Jan Sloot claimed he had cracked something impossible: a way to store an entire feature film in a single kilobyte of data, less than the plain text of this post. The Sloot Digital Coding System defied a basic law of information theory, which says that much unique video simply cannot be squeezed into that few bits. But Sloot demonstrated it anyway, apparently recording and replaying movies off a small smart card, and convinced serious money to back him — including Roel Pieper, a former Philips CTO, and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins.
Then, on July 11, 1999, one day before the deal was to be signed, Sloot was found dead in his garden of an apparent heart attack. A compiler stored on a floppy disk, the key piece, had vanished and was never recovered.
Engineers who later examined his rig discovered that his smart-card player actually contained a hard drive. One concluded that Sloot had faked the demonstrations to buy time while pursuing an impossible compression scheme.
