The first VCR I ever saw was at my school in the late 70s, can't remember the exact year. A huge, hulking beast of a machine with piano keys. It was on a trolley with a TV above it, and as they could only afford the one, it would regularly be seen being wheeled up and down corridors into classrooms.
The following year I was amazed to see a new system, in of all places our drama classes. It was a Sony recorder, in a large wooden cabinet with a video camera attached but used smaller tapes around the size of a cassette it seemed to me. I guess it might have been the forerunner to Video 8, but given that didn't appear until the mid 80s it was more probably Beta and I am thinking the tapes were smaller than they actually were (I'm getting old). I remember the video quality being quite poor, even back then though.
It did make me badger my parents until they gave in, and rented a VHS recorder of our own later that year. A huge, black and silver VCR with piano keys and a top loading mechanism. It was replaced later with a sleeker jet black unit, with small silver touch buttons. Still a big beastie by today's standards though. It was rented from Granada and had their logo and badge on it. A couple of years after that we had a silver JVC, which we used to record Countdown on the first day of the launch of Channel 4. That was our first recorder with a remote.