The world's oldest torrent file is called "The Fanimatrix", and it has been around since 2003.
The New Zealand live-action, fan-made version of The Animatrix was written and directed by Steven A. Davis and Rajneel Singh, and stars Steven A. Davis, Farrah Lipsham, Fasitua Amosa, and Vaughan Beckley. Its Fanimatrix name is a deliberate pun using the title The Animatrix and the term fan film.
With a budget of $800 of which was mostly spent on a leather jacket, the team completed the project in nine days. But this was when the problem for distribution.
When it was created, there weren't any reliable streaming websites. YouTube was created only years after this, so as Vimeo and others. Netflix on the other hand, only sent out films via postal services.
The team faced a tough challenge.
After the makers reduced the film's filesize down to 150MB, that was still too expensive to host. And according to Sebastian Kai Frost, who also had a part in the project, a regular centralized hosting was not an option.
With literally no budget left, they had to find something cheap, or free. Fortunately, Frost who was working as a network administrator at the time, stumbled into a technology that could help. It's called 'BitTorrent', a file-sharing protocol by Bran Cohen that at the time, was only 2 years old.
"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," said Frost.
After convincing the team that BitTorrent was the right choice, Frost created a torrent file for this Fanimatrix on September 27, 2003. He also compiled a tracker on his own Linux box and made sure everything was running correctly.
"It turns out that using BitTorrent was a really really good idea because the file was downloaded over tens of thousands of times in the first week and then REALLY took off based off feature news articles on both New Zealand and American TV news," recalled Frost.
"I intend to keep it going as long as I have a seed left to give," concluded Frost.
The crew ended up saving $550,000 on hosting fees thanks to BitTorrent.
Previously, the oldest known torrent file was a fan-created ASCII version of the The Matrix.
The torrent file of The Matrix ASCII was created on December 20, 2003. It was kept alive by only a few to one seeder. And when the website was down, the torrent struggled to even survive, but Jack, who created the torrent, restored the Matrix ASCII website on a new address, restoring some seeders in the process.
As long as the torrent file can be found and there are seeders around to distribute the larger content, torrent files should continue to live. Both Fanimatrix and the Matrix ASCII are the first showcases of what BitTorrent and its peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) protocol can do.
The news first came from TorrentFreak, saying that this is "a remarkable achievement."