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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.

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Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?

Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.

Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.

It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.

This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization.

Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.

I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.

It tends to happen in the area in general where I live. My house, neighbour's house, a house a mile away, all have the same trouble. I live within about six hundred yards of a volunteer fire department and about seven hundred yards from an elementary school, and even they've complained about how often the power goes out. The worst part is it's not like it's off for a few minutes and then it's back on. It's a momentary tenths of a second thing, like someone flicking a light switch down and up once to get people's attention.

I remember having trouble with mine, often mixing up the various hours (clock time, start time, end time, recording duration). Yes it was not rocket science, but it was used not enough to remember how to do it, and the manual was never ad hand when needed.

Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.

But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ

Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)

I mean that's exaggerating. I did it, it took maybe 10 minutes following the examples in the manual. It was not very intuitive though, so if it wasn't something you set up often you'd always have to go back and read the instructions again the next time.

I'm going from memory (i was a kid and he is dead so no wap to verify) but hours stands out. Remember he was a truck driver not someone used to reading technical documents. We also don't know which vcr's - yours might have been easier than his, or your program simpler).

who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.

My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)

I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE

The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.

The last short lived generation of VCR we owned had an on screen menu/UI driven by the remote control for setting time and programming a scheduled recording rather than arcane and tedious sequences of button presses.

I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.

In theory, HDMI CEC should solve a lot of those problems. Unfortunately it only introduced another buggy layer.

But that was the niche, "elite" experience. Today, a "smart TV" is the norm.

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