This two-hour 1989 Word tutorial is both the most boring video ever made and a work of art
Tracking shots be damned, this one-take retrowave tutorial is a beautiful piece of mundanity
Computers as we know them today spew a Niagara Falls torrent of caffeine sweat, bile, and garbage water cascading constantly upon society’s collective head, so it’s often difficult to envision a time when they were (by 2021's standards) boring as all hell. Still, it’s difficult to watch the following wondrous, three decades’ old archival footage below and not think that, even standing upon the precipice of a new, connected age of technological progress, people managed to stay awake through this whole thing.
Although first uploaded to YouTube was over 7 years ago, this nearly 2-hour tutorial on Microsoft Word 4.0 brought to you by Florida Marketing International, Inc.’s “MacAcademy” series has recently resurfaced over at BoingBoing, and it certainly makes a solid case for its bestowed title of “The Most Boring Video Ever Made.”
Hosted by a seemingly very nice, very knowledgable person named Randall Smith (“Randy” to his friends and viewers), a man whose most interesting quality appears to be the way he pronounces the word “measure,” the Word tutorial is genuinely stunning in its absolute mundanity.