I'm 31 and used cassettes, vinyl records, even 8-tracks and never even owned a CD player until they made MP3 CD players and I don't get it.
I routinely spliced and repaired my own tapes even when I was 7 years old and learned the value of backing them up (I had dupes of all my kid tapes). I labeled my blank cassettes with a pen. I recall that I may have wound them with a pen once in a blue moon, but that's only when something was wrong (tape "eaten" by the player/recorder) and, even then, I often just used my fingers. That's not what this is referring to, is it? If so, that's kinda dumb because it was hardly universal.