Running HP Colorado T1000 tape drive under Linux - Part 1 : outdated drivers for linux 2.0

I have a HP Colorado T1000 drive with one backup tape from the win95 era (I can probably say there's doom on it). I'd like to leverage my new-found dell 4500s desktop to plug it and extract the 400-800MB of data, but the linux driver, namely `ftape`, is for linux 2.0 I believe. I downloaded the latest release, version 4.04, from 2000:

dummy@x60s_GPT ~/work/ftape-4.04
  % cloc .                                                                                                                                !4591
     132 text files.
     121 unique files.                                        
      30 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.58  T=1.0 s (102.0 files/s, 31527.0 lines/s)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                                36           2210           4634          17256
C/C++ Header                     48            838           2018           3354
Bourne Shell                      8             48            214            396
make                              8             62            228            203
Bourne Again Shell                2              1             47             18
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            102           3159           7141          21227
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's a lot of lines TT_TT