The Humble Guys (THG) were a cracking group for the IBM PC during the late 1980s[1] founded by two friends known by the pseudonyms Candyman and Fabulous Furlough. The group was also noticed in the demoscene for some of their cracktros.
THG was the first group to make use of the NFO file as a means for documenting their releases before packaging and distribution.[2] The first release to contain an .NFO file was Nova Logic's remake of the arcade classicBubble Bobble in 1989. This has since spawned an entire generation of ASCII artists devoted solely to creating artwork for the purpose of decorating NFO files for warez groups. To put things into perspective, there are now entire websites explicitly devoted to the collection and archival of NFO files, such as The iSONEWS.
Software contributions
Screenshot from the THG cracktroREADTHG.EXE featuring The Humble Thug.
THG also was one of the first groups to release an "intro tool" for the IBMPCdemoscene, released by their coding subsidiary, THG F/X, called the THG IntroMaker. The THG IntroMaker would allow one to create a self-contained executable program which played music and displayed graphics on screen without the need for any knowledge of computer programming. A much more advanced and highly sophisticated extension of this today would be Farbrausch's .werkkzeug.[3]
Prior to THG's arrival on the warez scene the IBM world did not have anything other than text based intros usually quoting song lyrics. THG members brought the experience from the C64 and AMIGA warez scene bringing the first animated and graphical intros to the IBM scene.
In December 1991, the "F/X division" of The Humble Guys released a first and only copy of an electronic magazine called "The Humble Review" featuring game reviews and articles.[4] Writer and weblogger Justin Hall would have his first article published in the Humble Review; a film review of Akira by "Fusty".
Members of THG also had their own custom BBS software, originally a "forum hack", called L.S.D. BBS (Lush Software Designs) which was first introduced on June 1, 1990, written by The Slavelord, Niteman and others. The original source code for this was Emulex/2, which was acquired by a THG member whose alias was Tripin Face. The source code was referred to as 'Jani' in some communities at the time.[5]
In the news
On the evening of October 27, 1992, NBC aired an episode about computerhackers on Dateline titled "Are Your Secrets Safe?".[6] This show prominently displayed ads for several warez BBSes, including one for The Slave Den BBS which was operated by a senior member and spokesperson of THG. As a result of this undesired exposure, The Slavelord voluntarily retired from his activities within the group.[7]
On September 5, 2006, David J. Francis, known by his username "Candyman" died in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, of heart failure.[8]
On October 4, 2015, Pierre Barkett, known by his username "The PieMaN" died in Florida of heart failure.[9]
Competition
THG redefined the manner in which the PC warez scene worked when they entered the scene in 1989. Prior to THG, warez releases were haphazard, with multiple groups releasing the same title, usually after the title had been available in retail stores for weeks. Often games were released to BBSes without being cracked. THG changed this by releasing titles days before the software made it to retail chains such as Babbage's. They did this by establishing relationships with the major wholesale software distributors, and ordering games with overnight shipping. For those cases where overnight shipping wasn't enough, THG found people who lived near the software companies, who could go to the company, and buy the game the day it was released. This beat the overnight shipping method by 2 days in most cases. Also, an advantage that they possessed was that most other warez groups were run by teens, who attended school during the day. THG was run by professional men, who were available each day "by 10:30" when FedEx, or UPS delivered. The other groups had to "wait until they got home" in the afternoons. A decided advantage considering most "cracks" were done in less than an hour, and releases complete shortly thereafter.
THG had members who worked for morning TV shows. Software companies, ever eager for free advertising, would send a box of new, or in some cases "about to be released" software to a TV show, for just a simple phone call. They also understood the "progression" of software. Once a title was completed, the box, manual, and final version of the game were shipped to a "duplication house" to copy the software for sale in stores. THG had contacts in these duplication houses, where they could get the games weeks before they would show up at the store. Activision's F-14 Tomcat was one such title, along with all titles from MicroProse.
At the height of their power, THG had game suppliers in the US (country wide), UK (Leeds), France, Germany, and many parts of Asia.[1]
THG introduced the concept of couriers in an effort to plaster their releases on their competitors' BBSes. The couriers were often told to make sure that the various groups received the latest crack on their HQ's BBS before other THG BBSes. The combination of using software wholesalers and couriers turned the PC Warez Scene upside down in 1990, but these are considered normal practice now. The fierce competition within the current warez and video scenes are directly descended from THG.
As a result, the majority of older, well established, warez groups disappeared from the scene.[1] Of the four or five groups that were around prior to THG's arrival in December 1989, the only group that remained was the International Network of Crackers (INC), which was one of THG's greatest competitors in the IBM PC cracking scene. The file header of the executable THG cracktro, READTHG.EXE (displayed above), contains text which reads: "Cool Hand but fucks his dog and Phantom from INC" (sic), an insulting reference towards the vice-president and courier coordinator of their rival organization, INC.
After Candyman shut down his BBS (Candyland, originally run on CNET BBS), setup, development, maintenance and unique customization were continued by The Maker who was on hand from day one. After Candyman left the United States, Fabulous Furlough took over the reins of the group. After political infighting among the remaining members of the group led to problems within the organization, several of the newer members of THG splintered off and formed a new group called USA (United Software Association) which included several noteworthy members such as, Niteman, Genesis and The Humble Babe (who changed her name to The Not So Humble Babe upon her departure from THG). USA released a few games, most of them coming from one of THG's suppliers in Illinois, whom USA had managed to "turn". After the bust of The Not So Humble Babe on credit card fraud charges in Michigan,[10] USA teamed up with the European PC warez division of Fairlight and were cooperatively known as "USA/FLT". This inevitably lead to the two groups USA and THG warring with each other[11]
A year after the USA/FLT fiasco, several of the original members of The Humble Guys left the group in an effort to once again capture lightning in a bottle. However, by the fall of 1992 several other groups, such as Razor 1911, had joined the scene and this new group, while having some brief success,[12] was never as successful as THG. The new group fell apart shortly after The Slavelord shut down his BBS after the Dateline story.
During 1992 though early 1994, many THG releases were cracked by the UK branch which consisted of Hi. T. Moonweed, Bryn Rogers and Hydro, who struggled to keep the group together due to US burnout. The UK BBSes, The Flying Teapot (known as active from 1991-1992[13]) and The Demons Forge (ran by Hi.T and Bryn respectively[14]) became the UK's major landmarks.
By 1994, most of the founding members of The Humble Guys were no longer involved with the warez scene. After the Pits BBS in New York was shut down by Novell in 1995,[15] the group moved to IRC and had a presence on many different servers with the name #THG. They focused on distribution rather than cracking. The Humble Guys disbanded in the early 2000s when the last founding member left.
Related Research Articles
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), was a computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user could perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and distributed the crack.
The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.
.nfo is a filename extension for text files that accompany warez scene releases of pirated software or media.
FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of archive to which it belongs. Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used in the warez scene. FILE_ID stands for "file identification". DIZ stands for "description in zipfile".
Tristar and Red Sector Incorporated (TRSI) is a demogroup which formed in 1990. It came about from the longest-running cooperation in scene history. RSI existed from 1985, before being joined by the "T" later on. Evolving from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga and later to PC and various game console platforms - like the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo - and set-ups like Arduino, Android or Blu-ray, TRSI released a number of digital productions, dedicated to experimenting in phreaking or network alteration. Its members were spread around the world and still contribute to computer scene art and code after more than 27 years of history.
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
Superior Art Creations (SAC) is an underground artscene group which caters primarily to and is well known within the warez scene. SAC members have made, besides ANSI and ASCII art, VGA bitmap graphics, tracker music, and a variety of other works. SAC's character graphics have also been used in bottles and FTP servers.
International Network of Crackers (INC) was one of the premier cracking/releasing warez groups for the IBM PC during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community. However, as files were commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k.
The United Software Association (USA) was a warez organization which released games and software for the IBM PC platform during the 1990s. USA formed a co-op with the PC warez division of Fairlight which was best known as "USA/FLT". USA was formed as the result of a split of several members from another noteworthy PC group, The Humble Guys (THG). Key members, such as Genesis and The NotSoHumble Babe, left THG, eventually resulting in public displays of animosity.
CLASS (CLS) was a notorious and prolific warez group that existed between January 1, 1997, and January 9, 2004. The group was the target of federal raids such as Operation Fastlink. They specialized in cracked games, and sometimes had elaborate art in the cracktro or release. They were a global group and had many members worldwide. Class used their group abbreviation, CLS, as a suffix at the end of the files they released.
textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures, and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them". The site categorizes and stores thousands of text files, primarily from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s. A broad range of topics is presented, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, ezines, freemasonry, computer games, hacking, phreaking, politics, computer piracy, sex, and UFOs. The site was created and is run by Jason Scott.
Aces of ANSI Art was the first group of artists specifically organized for the purposes of creating and distributing ANSI art. The group was founded and operated by two BBS enthusiasts from California, "Zyphril" and "Chips Ahoy", from 1989 through 1991.
Video game piracy is the unauthorized copying and distributing of video game software, and is a form of copyright infringement. It is often cited as a major problem that video game publishers face when distributing their products, due to the ease of being able to distribute games for free, via torrenting or websites offering direct download links. Right holders generally attempt to counter piracy of their products by enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, though this has never been totally successful. Digital distribution of pirated games has historically occurred on bulletin board systems (BBS), and more recently via decentralized peer-to-peer torrenting. In terms of physical distribution, Taiwan, China and Malaysia are known for major manufacturing and distribution centers for pirated game copies, while Hong Kong and Singapore are major importers.
Razor 1911 (RZR) is a warez and demogroup founded in Norway, 1985. It was the first ever such group to be initially founded exclusively as a demogroup, before moving into warez in 1987. According to the US Justice Department, Razor 1911 is the oldest software cracking group that is still active on the internet. Razor 1911 ran the diskmag 'Propaganda' until 1995.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
