There really is a function cryptographers have been using for decades to convert names to 50-bits, and I have tried my best to remember how it was written.
The Latex code for the fifty bit name conversion function is:
f'(x)=)\sum_{x=1}^{lim\ x}ln(\Theta )\delta (x)

...which looks like this:

Function to convert names to 50 bits

That's all I can remember about how the function is written.

Thinking of your whole hard drive as one number to convert into a number and a decimal exponent is not how the usual ZIP type compression algorithms work.
It is sad that this function has been kept from all of us, because the 64-bit version of the program with this function would run much faster than the 16-bit days, and would save us all a whole lot of space.
Ideally, a card similar to a 700 GH/s Bitcoin miner card from ButterflyLabs.com would do this kind of heavy math work for you. (The military used ASIC chips instead, way back in the day.)

All the text in all the posts of RMN can fit in one decimal-exponent number, and fit on a 3.5 inch floppy disk.

That's how efficient the formula is.

By the way, after this function runs, there must also be some post-processing that gives you a single integer and a decimal exponent. Multiplying that out is apparently all you need, but it's still confusing to me because I don't understand the whole function. But ideally, you could make up your own function like this and pass jokes around by saying the hex version of your 50-bit code.

The program with this decimal-exponent convolution plows through a whole hard drive and makes all your data smaller from the beginning and the end of the hard drive at the same time. The big number ends up in the middle, and is much smaller than if you had just ZIPped the whole drive.
By the way, if you just tried this function on a hard drive full of ZIP files, the function wouldn't work as well.

Please write this equation on a napkin for someone, to see if it jogs their memory.
Tell them you're writing a science-fiction book involving cryptography, and you're going to put this function in. See how they react.

P.S.: It's possible I didn't remember the symbol correctly. Perhaps that Delta should have been a zeta? Then the equation is:
f'(x)=)\sum_{x=1}^{lim\ x}ln(\Theta )\zeta (\Delta x)
Reimann Zeta function values for low integers is one plus a decimal, which wouldn't increase your ongoing summation much. Which is good for most alphabets. The higher you go with the zeta function towards 255, the answer is one. So I'm just guessing here.

The web does not know about this function.