Dmitry Brant: Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
https://dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/07/using-claude-code-to-modernize-a-25-year-old-kernel-driver
"[…] one of my hobbies is helping people recover data from old tape cartridges, such as QIC-80 tapes, which were a rather popular backup medium in the 1990s among individuals […]
Whenever I receive a QIC-80 tape for recovery, I power up one of my older PC workstations which has the appropriate tape drive attached to it, and boot into a very old version of #Linux (namely CentOS 3.5), because this is the only way to use the ftape driver, which is the #kernel driver necessary for communicating with this tape drive, allowing the user to dump the binary contents of the tape. […]
The trouble is, the ftape driver hasn’t been supported since roughly the year 2000, and was soon removed from the #LinuxKernel for this reason. This is why I’ve needed to run a painfully old version of Linux anytime I have to work with one of these drives. It would be great if ftape worked on a modern distro, with all the benefits and affordances that would provide.
So a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me to make a simple request to Claude Code: […]"