I've seen really old scripts that use awk oneliners doing a printf (like echo | awk '{ printf ...) cause (and I have to guess here) it was not built in to /bin/

I've seen really old scripts that use awk oneliners doing a printf (like echo | awk '{ printf ...) cause (and I have to guess here) it was not built in to /bin/sh and there was no /usr/bin/printf command either!