"...the quarter-inch audiotape—first used in 1972...." Not hardly; these were popular home devices in the '60s and per Wikipedia the '50s, my family traded tap

"...the quarter-inch audiotape—first used in 1972...." Not hardly; these were popular home devices in the '60s and per Wikipedia the '50s, my family traded tapes with at least one of my mother's sibling's families back in the '60s, and I got my own TEAC unit no later than Christmas, 1974, by which time the low fidelity tape cassette was becoming a big thing.