The Sloot Digital Coding System was a data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — violating Shannon's source coding theorem by many orders of magnitude. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999, Nieuwegein), a Dutch electronics engineer. In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified. Background Sloot was born the youngest of three children. His father, a school headmaster, left his family quite soon after Sloot's birth. Sloot was enrolled at a Dutch technical school, but dropped out early to work at a radio station. After fulfilling mandatory military service, Sloot settled in Utrecht with his wife. He worked briefly for Philips Electronics in Eindhoven. He left this job in 1978 after a year and a half, starting his next job in Groningen at an audio and video store. A few years later he moved to Nieuwegein where he started his own company repairing televisions and stereos. In 1984, Sloot began focusing on computer technology such as the Philips P2000, Commodore 64, IBM PC XT, and AT. Sloot developed the idea of a countrywide repair service network called RepaBase with a database containing details on all repairs carried out. This concept was the motivation to develop alternative data storage techniques that would require significantly less space than traditional methods. Sloot Encoding System In 1995, Sloot claimed to have developed a data encoding technique that could store an entire feature film in only 8 kilobytes (8000 bytes). For comparison, a very low-quality video file normally requires several million bytes, and a 1080p movie requires about 3 gigabytes (3,000,000,000 bytes) per hour of playing time. , the plain text of the Dutch Wikipedia page describing the film Casablanca occupies 29,000 bytes. Roel Pieper, former CTO and board member of Philips, is quoted as saying (translated from Dutch): Pieter Spronck rebuts Pieper's codebook analogy by pointing out that Sloot claimed his invention was capable of encoding any video, not only those videos composed from a particular finite set of "recipes". In 1996, Sloot received an investment from colleague Jos van Rossum, a cigarette machine operator. The same year,