Every now and then, tech history coughs up a story so strange it feels like something out of a cyberpunk novel. One of these is the tale of Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot, a Dutch electronics technician who, in the late 1990s, claimed to have developed a revolutionary data compression technique. Known as the Sloot Digital Coding System, it promised to compress entire movies into just 8 KB of data.
Yes, you read that right. Not gigabytes. Not megabytes. Kilobytes.
And to be clear, this isn’t “8K” as in “really high res movie codec.” I mean “you give me 8KB on a filesystem and I will encode the entire HD movie to it, so you can play it back from only that 8KB file.”
This wasn’t just empty boasting in a random corner of USENET. Sloot had serious believers. One of them was a man named Jos van Rossum, an executive at a Dutch electronics firm called Wegener Arcade. Impressed by Sloot’s demonstrations, van Rossum invested 250,000 Dutch guilders (around €113,000 today) to help develop the technology. That early funding allowed Sloot to build prototypes and court more attention.
And attention he got.
Big names in tech and media — including former Philips CTO Roel Pieper — became involved. Pieper, at the time, was semi-retired but saw Sloot’s codec as potentially world-changing. How could it not be? 8KB!
Today in 2025, a 64GB thumb drive or micro-SD card can hold perhaps 30 movies. That’s for a 1080p film, encoded to about 2GB using x265 or something, and allowing a little space lossage for filesystem, etc.
The Sloot Digital Coding System promised you could hold 184 movies…on a 1.44 3.5″ floppy disk.
By 1999, plans were reportedly in place for a licensing deal with Philips, and Pieper himself was poised to join the board of the company they were forming to commercialize the tech. But just days before the crucial contract signing, Sloot was found dead of a heart attack at the age of 45.
Worse, the technical details of the codec — allegedly contained on a single floppy disk — vanished. Without Sloot or the original source code, the project collapsed into mystery.
What Was the Sloot Digital Coding System?
The basic claim was that the system didn’t store the data in a conventional way. Instead, it allegedly leveraged a massive lookup database of patterns and templates — a kind of universal codec that could reference pre-existing data “universes” instead of storing every byte redundantly.
If this sounds like a magic trick to you, you’re not alone. Skeptics point out that this runs counter to the well-established rules of information theory — specifically, Shannon’s entropy limit, which tells us that while you can compress some data, you can’t compress all data arbitrarily far.
Now, the idea of a large lookup database is legit, and is used in many scenarios, both computer and non-computer. For example, in dictionary-based compression schemes, if my text is “banana banana banana banana,” then I record that “1 = banana” in the dictionary and put “1” in the places where “banana appears”. Likewise, I could give a military submarine a book with an array of orders and then periodically transmit a number saying “implement plan 17”. The transmission is very brief, but of course, the try information transfer is still the same – it just happened when the sub left port with a bulging folder of possibilities.
The problem in Sloot’s situation is that the size of such a universal lookup table would be unimaginably large. It’s been calculated that storing every possible 2-hour movie at HD quality would require more atoms than exist in the known universe. At a raw level, a 1920×1080 frame is 2 million+ pixels, which can be many different colors, plus sound. A single 1920×1080 still is more than 8KB.
Or as Wikipedia points out, the Dutch language plain text summary of Casablanca is more than 29,000 bytes.
Yet, the demos were reportedly convincing. Sloot would show investors a film like Terminator 2, retrieved from a tiny data file, seemingly proving his point. However, without the underlying technology surviving him, no one has been able to replicate the feat.
Hoax, Misunderstanding, or Tragic Genius?
There are three main theories:
Outright hoax. Sloot was a conman, fooling even technically capable investors with sleight-of-hand demos.
Misunderstood concept. Some theorize that Sloot’s “compression” wasn’t really compression, but more akin to advanced templating or data reconstruction from a predefined, massive shared database — meaning it would only work with predefined content, not arbitrary data.
Genuine breakthrough lost to time. A tantalizing possibility, albeit an unlikely one. If true, it would be one of the greatest “what ifs” in computing history.
I favor the view that Sloot fooled himself. He evidently did some math but mixed something up in his calculations. Sloot was a qualified electrical engineer, so he should have had enough basic math to understand the mistake he was making. Even I, a history major for pity’s sake, can see it’s absurd.
But you don’t get €113,000 for being a skeptical history major like me.
I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
Right now we are using TWO of such systems of data compression ;)
Torrent files and magnet-links :)))
We dont need to go far to understand the IMPOSSIBILITY of a sick compressin like that.
Take THE PINGEONHOLE PRINCIPLE to “connect the dots” and to see it mathematically that: The Sloot Dream IS IMPOSSIBLE
THE PIGEONHOLE PRINCIPLE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle