Heh, back in the days before customers names where Robtert'); DROP TABLES users;--

Things were a weird mix of harder and easier back then. You'd have to flip magic switches on chunks of hardware to multiple times so things would speak, but in general you didn't worry about your data attacking the computer.

This is cool because the raw data included the text, so you didn’t have to OCR or anything. Unfortunately the same today might be harder depending on the situation you’re thrown in - I think if you are given PCL printer output there’s a good chance it’s all been rasterized before being sent to the printer. Budget printers are now removing all parsing from the printer (given sufficient bandwidth over the interface, unlike with parallel or serial ports, or even USB 1.0) in the name of cost cutting and rasterize the entire output on the PC, then send the entire page at 300dpi with some line compression to the printer - which is why the printed text always has a soft, almost blurred look.

(Ironically yesterday was the first time I had trouble with my Postscript printer configured to always download soft copies of fonts from the PC; I was printing in Arabic from MS Word and the printer was making the strokes so bold all the letters connected. Converting to a PDF and printing from Adobe did the trick.)

yeah it had some "printer codes" formatting but it was like ANSI terminal stuff, easy enough to parse out and the rest was all plain ascii and simple. at the time the system might've been set up for a Postscript printer and that would've been practically impossible to do anything with.