The world’s oldest torrent is still being downloaded – after more than 12 years!

The nature of BitTorrent is that files only live on in the network if at least one person keeps seeding it. Which means, most torrents die after the public loses interest. So imagine how rare it is to find a torrent that’s still going strong some 12 plus years after its creation on 20 December, 2003.

Evidently there at present 62 active seeders and 41 people queuing to get the file, so you could say the torrent has come a long way since TorrentFreak first reported the torrent had dropped down to just a single seeder back in 2005.

Created as a piece of fan-art, The Matrix-ASCII is the work of a single fan who painstakingly converted the movie frame by frame to ASCII text, then cropping, resizing and coloring the final output. Audio had to be later extracted on a separate computer and apparently DivX doesn’t support ASCII images well, so he created the movie in DVD-format, which works out to a 4.38G DVDR file. Also included in the torrent are short and long samples, the original MPEG-2 file (which comes up to 7.44G), and there's even a DVD cover and insert.

That’s certainly a lot of effort for a single fan, who has even included a small disclaimer with his work: “This work is a parody. As such I do not believe that this DVD has any possibility of competing with the original in any market. It is not for sale.”

There are obviously no official registers for something like BitTorrent, so we’ll have to count on sites like TorrentFreak to keep track of just how long The Matrix-ASCII keeps going.

Sources: TorrentFreak, International Business Times, The.Matrix-ASCII

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