GOT IT (kinda ..) !!
So letting the world know .. :)
The poco-dev package in the Ubuntu repository doesn't seem to be very useful.
I downloaded poco from
https://pocoproject.org/download/.
I ran ./configure ; make -s ; make -s install.
For some reason make install didn't copy any files to /usr/lib so I did it manually. I copied libPocoNet.so.49 and libPocoFoundation.so.49 from the source directory into /usr/lib and changed the postfix from 49 to 44. This is what f8c wanted. Not sure about any consequences but since it's for education purposes only at the moment it's not critical.
Apparently I also had to install libmalloc-minimal4.
I did all that and suddenly f8c -h showed me the output I expected to see ...