I teach 7th Grade. I had a student, a fairly intelligent one actually, who told me that her Grandma has a VCR. She took a tape, went to the machine, and pressed the eject button. She waited. Pressed it again.
She was waiting for the “disc tray”, so to speak, to come out so she could put the tape in. She figured it out in the end.
Stupid kids! 
Cool. Does it work with CDs too, or do you need a separate unit?
Doesn’t matter, because with un-rewound CDs, you can just set the player to play the songs in reverse order.
When I got my first VCR in 1981 the tapes were $25.00 each!
Betamaxes kept the tape wrapped around the drum, so rewinding/FF actually created additional wear on the heads. VHSes unwrapped the tape from the drum so not so much a problem. (On later/better models, the tape was kept wrapped for a short while during FF/RW to speed up searching. After a few seconds it would unwrap completely for speed.) Betamaxes also had a much better system for detecting the end of the tape. So a common failure for VHSes was the led detector system failing and ruining tapes.
On one of my VCRs, if the tape had the write-protect tab out, on insert it would play the entire tape to the end, rewind and eject. So idiot renters had to perform minimal actions to watch a movie.
To clarify…the blank tapes were $25! I mourn the things I didn’t tape back in the day because of the expense of blank videotapes. A case of 10 at $250 was an expensive indulgence.
Don’t you hear messages from Satan when you do that?
The video department I volunteer for still uses miniDV tapes, and we still use an older miniDV deck to rewind them. This reduces wear on the heads in the camera/recorder. Our thinking is that the deck is cheaper than a camera, and both are cheaper than replacing the heads.
By the way, we record HD to disk, and use that as our primary source material. The tapes are for archival backup.
I’m old enough that when I read this I pictured a top-loader and couldn’t figure out what the problem was.
I shoot to both MiniDV (HDV) and SD, and the DV tapes are less of a hassle. I can transfer to hard drive from the tape quicker than I can transcode the AVC/HD clips from the SD card. I know there are a handful of programs that can handle AVC/HD native, but none of them have the main feature I need - the ability to sync multiple camera tracks together and “hot switch” an edit to do an edit in real time like I can with Edius.
And to add to this bit of VCR tape history; back in those days I used to go to East Berlin on the weekends (the Wall was still up) and in the old communist days, those lucky enough to own a VCR in East Germany were only allowed to buy ONE blank tape per YEAR. If you were from the West, the best birthday/Christmas gift for someone in the East was to give them a blank tape - it was worth gold.
Most of the machines I have seen will rewind a tape when the end is reached if it is playing but will eject the tape if the end is reached while recording.