Reviving a 25-year-old Linux tape driver

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Dmitry Brant recovers data from 1990s QIC-80 backup tapes as a hobby. These tape drives plug into a PC's floppy-disk controller, a cost-saving trick that needs an unusual kernel driver called ftape. That driver was dropped from Linux long ago, so he had been booting an ancient CentOS 3.5 install every time he wanted to read a tape.

He used Claude Code to bring the roughly 25-year-old ftape driver up to date so it builds and runs as a module on a modern Linux kernel. That meant reworking code written for kernel interfaces that no longer exist. The result lets him dump tapes on a current system, and his post walks through how the session went and where his own knowledge of the hardware still mattered.