Originally published at: 1989 Microsoft Word tutorial is "the most boring video ever made" | Boing Boing
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Yup, minute 59 is quite something. But then again, the video was produced in Florida
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He was a wild a crazy guy in his youth who used to love Mad magazine. That’s what I’m taking from minute 59.
This version of Word was before even I used it. I was using Corel back then. But boy, do I remember setting tabs manually on those things. They tried mirroring what you did with a typewriter, but over time that’s faded out as better methods have replaced manual tab stops.
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There are a few of those scattered in there. At 21:26 “there’s no hope in there, and no command-m for miracle.”
One take, with sardonic humor scattered throughout. Genius.
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Alan Parsons Project “Mammagamma” in the intro. Next level insert there.
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I didn’t find that at all monotonous. In fact I got rather drawn in by his deadpan delivery and little smirks. I also – and it really pains me to say this as someone who has been using Macs since not long after this video was made – learned a couple of things that I didn’t know before.
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I just learned you can do math on columns in Word from this.
There are a LOT of light, sarcastic, deadpan jokes in this. Like having blunted scissors in kindergarten so they didn’t run around stabbing each other (“cut and paste”).
This guy is accurate, thorough, and like the Terminator he WILL NOT STOP until the job is done.
I’m impressed.
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The real mind-blowing drama is that he used hanging indents, rather than Word’s numbered list feature, to format his list. Did Word really not include a button for formatting numbered lists in 1989?
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10 min in, not a dull moment so far.
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I’ve been trying to locate him. And I think I have, via his old company, and cross-referencing addresses. Sadly it seems he’s a member of the Republican Party of Florida. I mean maybe he’s the guy in the Republican Party of Florida who doesn’t support Trump. But is there that guy?
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Ladies and gentlemen, the only tutorial video on YouTube that doesn’t start with “hey guys, what’s up? [creator] here…”
I agree with everyone else here, this is hardly boring. The subject matter is extremely dry to be sure, but the presenter does a really good job of walking through it in a way that’s still friendly and approachable. His little jokes throughout (I just hit the point where he says “the biggest advantage to the Apple Macintosh is you don’t need to read the manuals to use it. You’ll also find that the biggest disadvantage to the Macintosh is that you don’t need to read the manuals to use it.”
I also love that he gripes about Word 4.0 being over-burdened with too many features, in 1989.
This sounds like a job for @makeupaguy on Twitter.
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If my memory is correct, bullets and numbered lists were introduced along with the new customizable toolbars feature (an addition to and somewhat replacing the ribbon) in Word for Windows 3.0 and Word for Macintosh 5.1
Many remember these versions to be the last perfect release of Microsoft Word. Afterwards was the “common UI (in codebase too?)” 6.0, a bloated hot mess in both platforms, and now every feature had it’s own toolbar.
The one saving grace of 6.0 if I remember correctly, was automatically applying numbered lists or bullets based on what you just typed was introduced with AutoCorrect. I think they dubbed it “IntelliSense” at the time.
6.0 was the version before the animated assistants, known otherwise as “clippy.”
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Jesus Christ I can’t stop watching… also… am I the only one that misses clean simple user interface like that??
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3 minutes 27 seconds
“The next thing you’ll want to do is insert”
snigger overload!
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