That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.

Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.