The oldest active torrent distribution in the world turns 20 years old (3 photos)

Twenty years ago, a group of friends on a tight budget filmed Fanimatrix is a fan film based on the blockbuster "The Matrix". To share their creation with the rest of the world they used nascent technology called BitTorrent - peer-to-peer network protocol for cooperative file sharing over the Internet. And on today the Fanimatrix torrent distribution is the oldest active torrent in the world.





0 Image source: Fanimatrix

In 2003, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. condition. Dial-up connections were used overwhelmingly the majority of users, and YouTube, Facebook and Gmail were not yet invented. It was at this time that a new exchange technology appeared files, which was destined to create a sensation. BitTorrent protocol made it much easier for people to transfer large amounts of data, including opening up opportunities for sharing video files.

Users began experimenting with BitTorrent, sharing primarily pirated films and television shows. These files distributed throughout the world and remained available until all their parts were stored online. Most of them were active in for several days or weeks, and some lasted more years before they lost interest. Few popular giveaways managed to survive for more than ten years.

It appears that the oldest surviving working torrent is this is Fanimatrix, a copy of a fan film based on the blockbuster "Matrix". The torrent was created in September 2003, and after a few He will be 20 years old in a few days. Such a duration of existence can be considered a truly remarkable achievement.



The short film was made by a group of New Zealanders friends. Operating on a very limited budget of NZ800 dollars, almost half of which was spent on a leather jacket for main character, they managed to complete the project in just nine days.

After filming was completed, it turned out that the biggest the problem is distribution, since conventional distribution channels movies were unavailable, and free video sharing services had not yet even appeared. The cost of launching your own server was several times higher funds spent on filming.

Then the group information technology specialist Sebastian Kai Frost began looking for alternatives. IN film, he played a small role and took on various technical functions, but the real breakthrough came when he came across a new technology called BitTorrent. "It looked promising because it scaled so that the more popular the file became, the the load on the bandwidth was distributed more. It seemed the perfect solution,” Frost recalled.

Convincing the team that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a new distribution on September 28, 2003. To check he compiled the tracker on my own computer running Linux and made sure everything was working correctly. Short film was a considerable success, with about 70 thousand downloads in the first week alone. Human. This achievement looks impressive because at that time BitTorrent was much less common.

Twenty years have passed and the torrent is still working and has more than a hundred givers, and the authors of the film plan to support the giveaway Fanimatrix for as long as possible. By according to researchers from the torrentfreak.com resource, this is the oldest an active torrent on the Internet that deserves to be included in textbooks on history.

We managed to download the short film, but not right away, because The announcement server kaos.gen.nz was unavailable for a long time. So We advise you to be patient if you want to join the story.