Twenty years ago, a group of friends were filming on a tight budget fan matrix – a fan film based on the box office hit “The Matrix.” To share their creation with the rest of the world, they used a new technology called BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network protocol for cooperative file sharing over the Internet. And today the Fanimatrix torrent distribution is the oldest active torrent in the world.
Image source: Fanimatrix
In 2003, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. The vast majority of users used dial-up connections, in addition to YouTube and Facebook.✴ and Gmail hadn't been invented yet. At that time, a new file-sharing technology emerged that would cause a sensation. The BitTorrent protocol has made it much easier for people to transfer large amounts of data, including the ability to share video files.
Users began experimenting with BitTorrent, primarily sharing pirated movies and TV shows. These files were distributed around the world and remained accessible as long as all parts of them were stored online. Most were active for a few days or weeks and some lasted more than a year before losing interest. Few popular promotional gifts have managed to survive for more than ten years.
It seems that this is the oldest torrent still working. fan matrix, a rip-off of a fan film based on the box office hit “The Matrix.” The torrent was created in September 2003 and will be 20 years old in a few days. This longevity can be considered a truly exceptional achievement.
The short film was made by a group of friends from New Zealand. With a very limited budget of NZ$800, almost half of which was spent on a leather jacket for the main character, they managed to complete the project in just nine days. Once filming was completed, distribution turned out to be the biggest problem, as the usual film distribution channels were not available and even free video-sharing services had not yet emerged. The cost of starting your own server was several times higher than the funds spent on filming.
So the group's IT specialist, Sebastian Kai Frost, started looking for alternatives. He had a small role in the film and took on several technical roles, but his real breakthrough came when he came across a new technology called BitTorrent. “It looked promising because it could be scaled so that the more popular the file became, the better the bandwidth load would be distributed. “It seemed like the perfect solution.”Frost recalled.
Frost convinced the team that BitTorrent was the right choice and created a new distribution on September 28, 2003. To test it, he compiled the tracker on his own Linux computer and made sure everything was working correctly. The short film was a notable success; Around 70,000 people downloaded it in the first week alone. This achievement is impressive since BitTorrent was much less common at the time.
Twenty years later, the torrent is still running and has over a hundred seeders, and the filmmakers plan to keep the Fanimatrix seed for as long as possible. According to researchers at torrentfreak.com, this is the oldest active torrent on the Internet and deserves to be consigned to the history books.
We managed to download the short film, although not immediately, as the kaos.gen.nz ad server was down for a long time. Therefore, we recommend that you be patient if you want to participate in the story.
