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 rat

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.