Remember the blinking 12:00 on many of our VCRs a few years back? Laziness and the unwillingness to penetrate opaque user guides had fostered millions of technology illiterates.

People didn’t mind. As long as they could play video tapes, who cared about a blinking light? There was a technical frontier across which a generation or two of Americans were not willing to venture.

This is not a new phenomenon. I seem to recall a time in the early days of automobiles when there used to be a lever on the steering column for “advancing the spark.” The idea was that the spark needed to advance — fire earlier in the combustion cycle, that is — during cold starts and then be slowly retarded as the engine warmed up.

This is no mystery to those of us who did routine tune-ups during the mechanical distributor days before electronic ignition.

But I can only imagine that a hundred years ago capable drivers must have been deemed a kind of magician full of arcane knowledge that kept the horseless carriage going.

These days, when we turn the key in what is still called the ignition, most people haven’t the faintest idea what happens, except that they can now take out their cell phones and head for work.

In recent columns I’ve been alternately singing the praises or mocking the many facets of Apple’s new übergadget, the iPhone. I may have missed the point.

This past weekend I thought I’d teach Meg how to play a DVD in our system. I thought it would be good because one time I went on a road trip without switching our new LCD HDTV back to TV mode.

When I called to let her know I’d made it OK, I got an earful about how she couldn’t watch the news because she couldn’t figure out what to do.

In hopes of avoiding a repeat disaster, I told her, “First, use the Comcast remote to turn off the cable. You won’t need that.

“Next, turn on the DVD player and insert the disc. Then, press the HDMI button until the green light is on the bottom setting (this sets the player to 480p, which works best with the ‘natural’ setting of the HDTV).

“OK, next, turn on the TV, hold down the INPUT button until a menu shows on the screen, and use the up-down arrows to select HDMI, then use the PIC SIZE button and go through the different sizes until the screen is filled and the heads don’t seem stretched too wide. Oh, but watch out because the size for the coming attractions will probably be different from the actual movie.

“Finally, Meg, turn on the Carver amp and choose Video 3. That’ll give you the Dolby 5.1 sound. OK, there you are.”

Meg put down the last of four remotes, turned to me with a look that had divorce court all over it, and said, “I’ll never remember all that, and don’t ever make me do that again.”

So, Steve Jobs, if you can make an iPhone that can do everything really simply, expensive as it is, then more power to you. And while you’re at it, do something about our home theater catastrophe. I’ll pay anything for it, and I mean anything.