7. Sloot Digital Coding System - Super File Compression
In the late 1990s, a Dutch guy named Jan Sloot announced that he had developed a digital coding system that would allow you to store large files in tiny amounts of digital space. He claimed that his revolutionary code could pack an entire movie down to a file size of just 8KB. This kind of compression is still far in advance to what we are currently able to do at the time of writing in 2015, by a veritable country mile. Despite the seemingly impossible nature of the invention, Sloot was supposedly able to demonstrate it to an astonished panel of Philips executives by playing 16 movies simultaneously from a 64KB chip. It was big, people were excited and the invention garnered the interest of lots of investors. Sloot, however, died just one day before he was due to hand over the source code. The investors were all ready to carry on with the technology after Sloot's death, but a vital piece of the puzzle, a compiler stored on a floppy disk, was lost, never to be recovered. There has been much speculation as to how the code worked. It's generally considered to be physically impossible for it to work using conventional file compression. One alternative solution is that it works, not my storing whole files, but discreet snippets of information that can be dragged out and reordered by a series of commands. So, to play a film, every possible combination of RGB is stored on a small device (say, a special motherboard in your laptop), you download the "key" to that movie that pulls up specific combinations of RGB for each frame, put these all together and you get your film, composed of elements already stored on your computer.