Parallel Tape Drive?

Hello. I have a quick question that maybe someone can answer.

I have a Sun Ultra 5 Workstation that I use at home. It only has a
floppy drive and a write-only CD; thus making backups painful. I also
have a plain-vanilla QIC-80 parallel tape drive. My hope is to install
this device on the workstation to use as a backup. Essentially, all I
am looking to do is write a “end of day” script that will tar my home
directory to the tape drive and shut down the machine.

Is this possible? The tape drives documentation says it will work w/
Un*x, but of course fails to mention any specifics. How would I go
about telling Solaris 9 that there is a blocking device on the parallel
port? I read over the service manual (805-7763-12.PDF) and didn’t find
anything specifically addressing this scenario.

Thanks for your time.