The Reality Of 'Silicon Valley'

Mike Judge Michael Caulfield/Getty Images When Mike Judge, creator of Office Space and Beavis and Butt-head, set out to write his HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley, about Bay Area coders, he wanted to conceive a simple, believable widget for his characters to invent. So he teamed with Stanford electrical engineering professor Tsachy Weissman and Ph.D. student Vinith Misra; they came up with a superfast compression algorithm. Data compression makes files--text, music, movies--smaller and more tra...