Yes. However, if you had skipped the -f, it would have been valid. Without the filename argument, it assumes it should extract from the tape drive (TAR = Tape ARchive). The tape device is probably something like /dev/rmt0, but you don’t need to specify that. Using the -f is technically an exception which means “instead of extracting from the tape like you’d normally do, pretend that this file is the tape device instead.”
My one thing I feel like I can brag about in tech circles is that I switched to Linux in 1995 (Linux kernel version 1.2.1), and I haven’t looked back since. This was even before Windows 95 was released.