The Humble Guys
Encyclopedia
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...
group for the IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
during the late 1980s founded by two friends known by the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s Candyman and Fabulous Furlough. The group was also noticed in the demoscene
Demoscene
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...
for some of their cracktros.
THG was the first group to make use of the NFO
.nfo
.nfo is a commonly used three-letter filename extension of ASCII or extended ASCII text files that accompany other files and contain information about them. Such NFO files can be viewed with text editors or dedicated NFO viewers...
file as a means for documenting
Documentation
Documentation is a term used in several different ways. Generally, documentation refers to the process of providing evidence.Modules of Documentation are Helpful...
their releases before packaging and distribution. The first release to contain an .NFO file was Nova Logic's remake of the arcade classic
Arcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...
Bubble Bobble
Bubble Bobble
is an arcade game by Taito, first released in 1986 and later ported to numerous home computers and game consoles. The game, starring the twin Bubble Dragons and , is an action-platform game in which players travel through one hundred different stages, blowing and bursting bubbles, avoiding...
in 1989. This has since spawned an entire generation of ASCII art
ASCII art
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...
ists devoted solely to creating art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
work for the purpose of decorating NFO files for warez
Warez
Warez refers primarily to copyrighted works distributed without fees or royalties, and may be traded, in general violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to unauthorized releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar...
groups. To put things into perspective, there are now entire websites explicitly devoted to the collection and archival of just NFO files, such as The iSO News.
Software contributions
THG also was one of the first groups to release an "intro tool" for the IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
PC
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
demoscene
Demoscene
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...
, 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
Computer programming
Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
. A much more advanced and highly sophisticated extension of this today would be Farbrausch
Farbrausch
Farbrausch, or Farb-rausch, is a German group of demomakers who made themselves particularly famous in the demoscene in December 2000 with a 64k intro called "fr-08: .the .product". "Farbrausch" literally translates to "rave of color", "color rush" or "color frenzy" in English...
's .werkkzeug.
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.(TM)
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. For its time, this was a state of the art magazine for the IBM PC.
Members of THG also had their own custom BBS
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...
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 and others. The original source code for this was Emulex/2, which was acquired by Tripin Face (also referred to as 'Jani' in some communities at the time)
In the news
On the evening of October 27, 1992, NBCNBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
aired a sensationalist episode about computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
hackers
Hacker (computer security)
In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
on Dateline
Dateline NBC
Dateline NBC, or Dateline, is a U.S. weekly television newsmagazine broadcast by NBC. It previously was NBC's flagship news magazine, but now focuses on true crime stories. It airs Friday at 9 p.m. EST and after football season on Sunday at 7 p.m. EST.-History:Dateline is historically notable for...
titled "Are Your Secrets Safe?". This show prominently displayed ads
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
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.
About the same time Candyman (THG Frontman) saw an article in a local 615 newspaper about software pirates that he felt was so inaccurate that he called and arranged for a reporter to come to him and he would show them how it worked so they would write a correct article, and they did.
On September 5, 2006, David J. Francis, known by his username "Candyman" died in his hometown of St. Louis Missouri, of heart failure.
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'sGameStop
GameStop Corporation is an American video game and entertainment software retailer. The company, whose headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas, United States, operates 6,500 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New...
. 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, UK, France, Germany, and many parts of Asia.
THG introduced the concept of couriers in an effort to plaster their releases on their competitors' BBSes. The THG 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 of the fierce competition from THG, the majority of older, well established, warez groups disappeared from the scene. Of the four or five groups that were around prior to THG's arrival in December, 1989, the only group that survived the onslaught from THG was the International Network of Crackers
International Network of Crackers
International Network of Crackers was one of the premier cracking/releasing warez groups for the IBM PC during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
(INC).
One of THG's greatest competitors in the IBM PC cracking scene was the International Network of Crackers
International Network of Crackers
International Network of Crackers was one of the premier cracking/releasing warez groups for the IBM PC during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
(INC). The file header of the executable
Executable
In computing, an executable file causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," as opposed to a data file that must be parsed by a program to be meaningful. These instructions are traditionally machine code instructions for a physical CPU...
THG cracktro, READTHG.EXE (displayed above), contains text which reads: "Cool Hand but fuck
Anal sex
Anal sex is the sex act in which the penis is inserted into the anus of a sexual partner. The term can also include other sexual acts involving the anus, including pegging, anilingus , fingering, and object insertion.Common misconception describes anal sex as practiced almost exclusively by gay men...
s his dog and Phantom from INC" (sic
Sic
Sic—generally inside square brackets, [sic], and occasionally parentheses, —when added just after a quote or reprinted text, indicates the passage appears exactly as in the original source...
), 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 and first setup and customized by The Maker for Candyman) and 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
United Software Association
The United Software Association was a prominent 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...
) which included several noteworthy members such as Genesis and The Humble Babe (who changed her name to The NotSoHumble 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, USA teamed up the European PC warez division of Fairlight
Fairlight (group)
Fairlight is a warez and demo group initially involved in the Commodore demoscene, and in cracking to illegally release games for free, since 1987. In addition to the C64, Fairlight has also migrated towards the Amiga, Super Nintendo and later the PC...
and were cooperatively known as "USA/FLT". This inevitably lead to the two groups USA and THG warring with each other.
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
Razor 1911
Razor 1911 is a warez and demo group.-History:The group was originally founded as Razor 2992 by Doctor No, Insane TTM and Sector9 in Norway in October 1985 as a Commodore 64 software cracking group...
had joined the scene and this new group, while having some brief success, 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 supplied by the UK branch which compromised mostly of Hi.T.Moonweed, Bryn Rogers and Hydro who struggled to keep the group together due to US burnout. The UK BBS's, The Flying Teapot and The Demons Forge (ran by Hi.T and Bryn respectively) 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, and the group was just a shadow of its former self. The final end of The Humble Guys came when The Pits BBS in New York was shut down by Novell
Novell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...
in 1995.
Sense of humor
Members of THG had a unique sense of humorHumour
Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement...
which was not always received well by others in the warez scene. While fighting among different warez groups was always a part of the PC scene, prior to THG, the various groups in the scene were fairly modest. The swagger that The Humble Guys brought to the PC Warez Scene, best exemplified with their name, was typical of their tongue in cheek humor.
One of the biggest controversies created by THG was due to this humor and the creation of their courier corps. The people who were responsible for distributing THG's warez were forced to change their existing pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
to an assigned name and number; for example "Humble Slave #10". When THG was at the height of its game, people were lining up to trade in their name for an assigned number. Later, THG added fuel to the fire by making their courier division multi-tiered with the introduction the "Humble Spittle", effectively a lesser or entry-level Humble Slave.
THG would frequently include the following humorous tagline at the bottom of their NFO files:
- "Remember, you too can be either Humble Spittle, a Humble Slave, a Humble FranchiseFranchisingFranchising is the practice of using another firm's successful business model. The word 'franchise' is of anglo-French derivation - from franc- meaning free, and is used both as a noun and as a verb....
, a THG Distribution site, or even possibly a member."
Another example of their strange sense of humor was Candyman's departure from the United States. Candyman had decided to sell his business and travel deep into the heart of Mexico. The Maker and Drool Master Rick decided to spread rumor to explain his departure and that rumor still partially makes its rounds. The rumor was that Candyman had drawn the attention of the FBI — again — and had fled the country to avoid prosecution. This served to heighten the mystique of Candyman himself.
French-speaking
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
Frozen Tormentor (also the founder of iCE
ICE Advertisements
iCE Advertisements is a digital art group formed in 1991. Although the expanded title is rarely ever used, iCE is an acronym for Insane Creators Enterprise...
) once joined up with THG as a Humble Slave
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and then reportedly quit to join the International Network of Crackers upon the discovery of the connotations the name held.
Other examples include THG offering 8×10 glossy photograph
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
s of "your favorite Humble Guys member" and requesting hate mail
Hate mail
Hate mail is a form of harassment, usually consisting of invective and potentially intimidating or threatening comments towards the recipient...
to their Post Office box
Post Office box
A post-office box or Post Office box is a uniquely addressable lockable box located on the premises of a post office station....
:
- "Send us your hate mail! We LOVE to get your hate mail! All hate mail sent to the P.O. Box will be sent out on the LSDNet (tm) THG Arts and Letters Section! * Note * All Letter Bombs will be returned to sender."
The Humble Guys also used to operate a 1-900 telephone number which they used to announce information about their releases:
- "Also, Call the Humble 900 number - 1-900-535-4200 ext. 780
- NOTE! $2.00 per minute. Updated EVERY Monday Morning!!
- Kiddies under 18 MUST have their parents Permission!"
External links
- A collection of early NFO files released by THG
- I_RETIRE.TXT, A statement of retirement from one of the senior members of THG, The Slavelord (a.k.a. The Timelord).
- Application form to become a Humble Slave
- A list of THG software indexed at Pouet.
- The Humble Guys file and information repository on Defacto2.