The usage emanates from the 'clock' feature provided on many VCRs manufactured in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
The clock could be set by using a combination of buttons provided on the VCR in a specific sequence that was found complicated by most users.
"In most surveys, the majority of people have never time-shifted just because they don't know how to program their machines," said Tom Adams, a television analyst for Paul Kagan Associates, a media research firm, in 1990.
[2] 'The blinking twelve problem' thus refers to any situation in which features or functions of a program go unused for reasons that the designers never anticipated, largely because developers were unable to anticipate the level of understanding the users would have of the technology.
The term appears in the 1999 essay In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson.