Ever since I first set up a printer on Linux many years ago I thought Unix printing was awesome. In those days, before this current era where every mainstream print ui has some variant of &quot;save PDF&quot;, it was a huge breath of fresh air to have an interface so simple as &quot;pipe postscript into lpr&quot;. Once you got that part working you could pretty trivially set up samba to share it with Windows machines and not have to worry about the hideous world of Windows printer drivers. (For the rare occasion when I need to print I do that today on my home network, with OpenBSD running lpd and samba talking to OS X and Windows clients.)<p>Recently I read on HN that in the 70s, formatting documents with troff and printing them provided the financial justification for Unix back then. I was not surprised. Unix philosophy and printing mix well together, probably not by accident.