As for fusion360... Freecad is getting mighty good these days...
One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0.
Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed.
Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.
As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of backward compatibility.
So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?
If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today (to me anyway).
(Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)
https://x.com/normankev141/status/1146547923758538755?t=oZrj...
text of tweet: So I bought a networked printer recently and as you do decided to try connecting to it a few different undocumented ways. I tried telneting to it. It turns out that whatever you type, it prints typewriter style. That was a pleasant and hilarious surprise. #internetofshit