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The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old (torrentfreak.com) 33

Posted by BeauHD from the truly-remarkable-achievements dept.
Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their "Fanimatrix" release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today. Ernesto Van der Sar writes via TorreantFreak: The oldest surviving torrent we have seen is a copy of the Matrix fan film "The Fanimatrix." The torrent was created in September 2003 and will turn 20 years old in a few days. A truly remarkable achievement. The film was shot by a group of New Zealand friends. With a limited budget of just $800, nearly 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 hurdle. Free video-sharing services didn't exist yet and server bandwidth was still very costly. Technically the team could host their own server, but that would cost thousands of dollars, which wasn't an option. Luckily, however, the group's IT guy, Sebastian Kai Frost, went looking for alternatives.

Frost had a bit part in the film and did some other work as well, but the true breakthrough came when he stumbled upon a new technology called BitTorrent. This appeared to be exactly what they were looking for. "It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution," Frost told us earlier. After convincing the crew that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent on September 28, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly. Today, more than twenty years have passed and the torrent is still up and running with more than a hundred seeders. As far as we know, it's the oldest active torrent on the Internet, one that deserves to be in the history books. "I never expected to become the world's oldest torrent but now it's definitely become a thing I'd love to keep carrying on. So I'll be keeping this active as long as I physically can," Frost tells TorrentFreak. "It's really heartening seeing the community pull together around this torrent, despite its usually low transfer count, and work together to keep it alive and kicking. It warms my heart on the daily."

"We're super pumped that it's still going and that people still take an interest in it. Looking forward to the 25th and having something special to share with the world," Frost concludes.
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