As opposed to Apple, who just assumes you don't use printers older than 2 years and liberally breaks old printers and scanners.
Now that most computers can hold a page in their L2 caches, it's easy and much faster to render in-memory and send a bitmap over to the printer driver to let it print with whatever options it wants. All the driver needs is to accept a bitmap and print it as well as it can and you can safely ignore most of the printer's own PDL.
Most of the thorny issues in printing are with special-purpose printers - thermal, barcode, embedded text only, etc.
Apple uses CUPS and it should work fine with older printers. Last time I checked, CUPS could handle an HP Deskjet 500 (if you have the parallel port)
He found the printer that was emitting the graphs was actually more powerful than the (very expensive) machines running the simulations, to the point that converting the simulation to postscript (or some variant thereof) and running it directly on the printer was some orders of magnitude faster.