A few years later (2002-ish), I setup a Zebra barcode/label printer that had a similar mechanism. I’d write the code for the label in the printers language (ZPL

A few years later (2002-ish), I setup a Zebra barcode/label printer that had a similar mechanism. I’d write the code for the label in the printers language (ZPL?) and then FTP a file to the printer. I was in grad school in a wetlab, so I had to label a ton of microcentrifuge tubes. Having a quick web interface e to generate the ZPL files that would be FTP’d to the printer let me avoid writing all of that out by hand. It was such a simple system. And the FTP server was basically a queue, so you could print a bunch of labels at a time.