Back in 2000: CUPS 1.0, FLTK, The X Printing Panel, and OpenPrinting
I assume that our vulture had already used Unix and/or Linux back in 2000, when CUPS 1.0 came out, I read an article (by Kurt Pfeifle) in the German "Linux Magazin" about CUPS, deployed it in the physics department network where i was admin of, to solve some printing problem, especially printing from Linux on a Tektronix Phaser something color laser printer, then saw that I could access all the settings of a (in that time modern) PostScript laser printer, but only on the command line. So to make things easy to use for physicists I created a simple print dialog, the X Printing Panel, and the toolkit I used that time was FLTK, version 1.0.7. With this I got it together in around 10 days, published it as free software, announced it on Freashmeat, and then Kurt Pfeifle saw it, invited me to big European Linux show LinuxTag mid-2000 to present it, I got invited to work at MandrakeSoft in Paris, to make Mandrake Linux using CUPS, founded OpenPrinting with some others mid-2001 With a lot of conference participation I made the other distros follow, ... And this is how I got what I am now ... Making printing just work ...
https://openprinting.github.io/history/
http://www.openprinting.org/
Biting the hand that feeds IT
