The Matrix ASCII: Oldest Torrent Alive Turns 10 Years Old

[mouse]

A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is currently the oldest torrent alive. Created exactly 10 years ago the file in question has achieved iconic status, piquing the interest of dozens of downloaders week after week. Warner Bros, is not known to go after this type of fan-art, so those who are interested can proceed to download without worry.

matrix-ascii-smallA decade ago the Internet looked vastly different from how it does today. Torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Torrentz were only a few months old, while Facebook and YouTube didn’t even exist.

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Back then BitTorrent was a relatively unknown technology that, for the first time in history, allowed users to share large videos with groups of people all over the world.

One of the torrents that gained quite a bit of traction in the early days is an ASCII version of The Matrix. This piece of fan art is a re-coded version of the original movie in green text on a black background, resulting in a rather unique viewing experience.

Thanks to BitTorrent, the creator of The Matrix ASCII was able to share his work with thousands of people. Exactly 10 years ago today on December 20, 2003, the torrent for this release was created.

A few weeks later the torrent file was first shared online, along with an ASCII DVD cover and insert. In the months and years that followed thousands of copies of the film were downloaded worldwide, and even today it is still being shared by a dozen people every day.

To the best of our knowledge, this means that The Matrix ASCII is the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared.

The.Matrix-ASCII screencap

[baseline bum]

Haha, I remember watching movies on aaxine without having to login to X

aaxine(1) - Linux man page

Name

aaxine - an ASCII art video player

Synopsis

aaxine [aalib-options] [-A<audio-driver>] [-a<audio-channel>] [-R<rec-by>] [MRL...]

Description



This manual page explains the aaxine program. Aaxine, is an aalib based frontend for libxine, a versatile video/multimedia player.

aaxine is for those who don't have a high end video card, but just want to watch DVDs on their good old vt100 ;-)

Like xine, aaxine plays MPEG system (audio and video) streams, mpeg elementary streams (e.g. .mp3 or .mpv files), avi files (using win32 codecs or ffmpeg), (S)VCDs, DVDs and many more. In short, anything that's supported by xine-lib.

[mouse]

baseline bum you are "old school" did you see this doc?

[rascal]

I never saw the movie, Matrix.

[mouse]

I never saw the movie, Matrix.

I finally saw it two months ago a friend of mine who is into conspiracies was talking about the blue pill in a NWO do entary. I was not sure what he was always talking about so I finally had to see the movie to understand the blue pill metaphors.