Jan Sloot

Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (* 1945 in Groningen ; † July 11, 1999 in Nieuwegein ) was a Dutch television technician .

Act

Sloot worked briefly in Eindhoven for Philips in the 1970s and later set up his own company, Sloot Services in Groningen. He repaired and sold electrical appliances such as televisions and stereos, but had to file for bankruptcy after five years . Since 1984 he lived in Nieuwegein, where he began to concentrate more on computer technology ( Phillips P2000 , Commodore 64 , IBM PC XT and AT ) and programming. In addition to his work as a television technician in his electronics store ERS (Electronica Reparatie Service) , Sloot developed the idea of ​​a nationwide repair service network called RepaBase with a computerized database of repair information that should document every repair ever carried out. The concept motivated him to develop an alternative method of data storage that should require significantly less storage space than conventional methods.

In 1995 he claimed to have discovered a lossless, highly efficient coding technique , the SDCS (Sloot Digital Coding System) . With this procedure it should be possible to reduce a complete film (or a complete DVD ) to the data volume of one KB (kilobyte) and to be able to save it on chip cards with a storage capacity of 64 KB. That would correspond to a compression factor of around two million. This method would far exceed the efficiency of even methods known today.

Although this technology is theoretically impossible in the opinion of experts, investors were found who saw potential in the project. In 1998 Sloot founded the Davoc company , which was restructured in 1999 under the name Dipro with new donors and partners such as Marcel Boekhoorn and the ex- World-Online board member René Bickel. In March 1999, the technology was presented to Philips CTO Roel Pieper . Pieper rejected the invention on behalf of Philips back, but left shortly after the group got ready as at Dipro CEO and named the company in The Fifth Force Inc order. With the help of his contacts he won further investors and potential partners such as Computer Associates , Sun Microsystems , ABN AMRO and financially strong venture capitalists such as Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Mayfield Fund.

However, Sloot succumbed to a heart attack in the garden of his house in Nieuweg a day before the conclusion of a lucrative deal, namely the all-important contract . The source code for his invention, which was supposed to be stored in an ABN AMRO locker , could not be found.

literature

• Eric Smit: The super code. An invention that brought death . Ehrenwirth Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2006, ISBN 3-431-03632-5

Web links

• Davoc website (Flash)
• Website for the book (Dutch)
• Dutch website about Jan Sloot with video and audio