Comment by WorldMaker

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.)