Tape recorders are a century old, and tape loops were how answering machines, toys, instruments like the Melotron, and many other devices worked until the digital era.

There a lot of things today that are less human-usable than they were a half-century ago, but also much more flexible and less expensive. We're still in a weird transitional phase post-transistor.

That would be the same 1970s when the American president was forced to resign because of the extensive voice recordings he made.

This wasn’t sci-fi stuff even back then.