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Twenty years ago, a group of friends made a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the world initially seemed too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Two decades later, his release "Fanimatrix" is the oldest active torrent still widely shared today.
In 2003, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. Dial-up connections were still the default, and YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail hadn't been invented yet.
There was a new technology that was making waves at the time. BitTorrent made it much easier for people to transfer large files, opening the door to unlimited video sharing without restrictions.
Many people started experimenting with BitTorrent by sharing pirated movies and TV shows. These files reached around the world and remained available as long as all the pieces were shared in the swarm.
Most of these early releases remained available for a few days or weeks, and some lasted over a year before people lost interest. In extreme cases, some torrents have managed to survive for more than a decade.
El Torrente Fanimatrix turns 20 years old
The oldest torrent we've seen is a copy of the Matrix fan movie."the fananimatriz”. The torrent was created in September 2003 and he will be 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement.
The film was filmed by a group of friends from New Zealand. With a limited budget of just $800, almost half of which was spent on a leather jacket, they managed to complete the project in nine days.
While shooting the film was possible with these financial constraints, finding a distribution channel proved to be a major obstacle. Free video sharing services didn't exist yet and server bandwidth was still very expensive.
Technically, the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn't an option. Luckily, the group's computer scientist, Sebastian Kai Frost, looked for alternatives.
Promising new technology
Frost had a small role in the film and did other work as well, but the real breakthrough came when he came across a new technology called BitTorrent. This seemed to be exactly what they were looking for.
“It seemed promising because it grew in such a way that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost told us previously.
After convincing the team that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux machine and made sure everything was working correctly.
Today more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it is the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books.
A suitable celebration for the 25th?
Initially, there was a plan to celebrate the 20th anniversary, but it has not materialized. Some of the originals cast members They have pretty successful careers now and are scattered all over the world, so getting the team back together is a challenge.
Director and writer Rajneel Singh, who is still active in the film industry, would like to do something special for the 25th anniversary. Frost says there's a plan to reunite the cast to film and release a new clip, perhaps along with some new "Fanimatrix" merchandise.
It's unclear if the torrent will still be running at that point, but Frost will do everything in his power to make that happen.
“I never expected to become the oldest torrent in the world, but now it has definitely become something I would love to continue doing. So I'm going to keep this going for as long as I physically can,” Frost tells us.
There were a few times when the torrent almost ran out, but after news broke that it was the oldest active torrent, dozens of people came forward to donate their bandwidth.
“It's really encouraging to see the community rally around this torrent, despite its generally low number of transfers, and work together to keep it alive and well. Warm my heart daily.”
“We are very excited that it is still running and that people are still interested in it. I'm looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world,” concludes Frost.
