Same sort of plan that abolished USAID and the Education Department.

Yeah except what you just wrote does not at all agree with what I wrote.

I am actually pretty serious here, there's something deep and psychological that happens when you hear people you respect suggest you might be doing something which could hurt you and if there's one thing the right understands it's when that button is getting pressed and how to press it harder.

Yes they're called ICE agents.

Everything is impossible until it isn't.

Yes, my motivation was a like harvest, and not simply correcting the rather shameful fact that I haven't actually said this yet.

Those machines were rare in the grand scheme, but devices which could record video by burning data to a DVD-R were called DVD recorders.

Yup, and the fact that as soon as the hard drive crashed or we were forced to get a new box meant we'd lose all our recordings explains why I have some episodes of Breaking Bad recorded on VHS

The "old" TV still just had an SD tuner box which was still hooked up to a VCR which still worked fine.

I am irritated by the fact that this happened so quickly that the original purpose of the VCR has left our collective consciousness.

And not just because I'm a pedant but because I think it's bad to forget that we used to be explicitly allowed to make personal copies of broadcast/copyrighted media.

Oh, in my mental framework this is for sure what happened.

Then, as people only used their VCRs to watch tapes they already had, most of which would be pre-recorded commercial releases like movies, it became a "player" much like a DVD player and that is how the language shifted over time.

Gotcha

Though VCRplus kind of tried to do that in the '90s. Not quite as simple but there used to be short codes printed in the TV guide that you could punch in to your VCR and it would automatically set up the recording details

(and then of course you had to program the VCR to make a recording during that time, but I used it plenty and it worked quite well. Made programming the VCR a bit easier, too, as you just told it to record from input 1 the whole time)

Interesting, I didn't think those showed up until the '90s

Did it offer a way to automatically turn on and tune to specific channels for a VCR? That's something the DirecTV boxes I first experienced in like 2003 could do.

You'd select "schedule for recording" or whatever on the guide.

If that's not clear enough, when I think of a cable box, I think of something that has its own on-screen guide that you can click around on and select channels based on what is playing now.

If it's just a descrambling device and the TV uses its own tuner to change channels, VCRs are unaffected.