On December 20, 2003, a torrent file was created for an ASCII version of The Matrix. In January 2016, after countless other albums, movies and TV shows have come and gone, it’s still active.


Since there’s no official world governing body of the torrent scene, the guys at TorrentFreak are the closest thing we’ve got, and having tracked the torrent for over a decade (they first wrote about it in 2005, when it only had a single seeder) they’re comfortable calling it “the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared”.

While in 2016 it’s easy for even the most obscure stuff to find a home in someone’s HDD, a lot of older torrents are gone because back when BitTorrent had “only a fraction of the users it has now” (the first client was released in 2001), it was a lot harder for torrents to remain continuously active.


This, though? Well, it’s fitting. If anything was going to survive from the days of a system like BitTorrent first crawling out of the internet, it was going to be an ASCII version of the Matrix.