Pens have come a long way, haven’t they? The first culture to develop pens where actually ancient Indians (from India), who dipped bird feathers and bamboo shoots in ink over 7,000 years ago. A few hundreds of years later, ancient Egyptians started using hollow reeds dipped in ink to write on their famed papyrus scrolls.  Dip pens were the only game in town for thousands of years, until fountain pens were created in the 10th Century. Even so, quill pens remained popular until the 19th Century.  Can you imagine writing a term paper using a giant feather that had to be dipped in a well of ink every couple of sentences?  I’d wager you cannot imagine that, no. 

The first ballpoint pens weren’t commercially available until 1940.  I’m sure they were an improvement and a revelation and all at the time, but I doubt that the people using them imagined that 70 years later we’d have strange devices called “flash drives” and “lasers” that we were able to build small enough to cram inside of a working ballpoint pen.  That’s the sort of mind-blowing stuff that even Jules Verne couldn’t dream up.  Yet here we have the Super Talent NG-S 4 GB 3-in-1 Pen, Flash Drive & Laser Pointer.  And they’re not even expensive!  Recession or not, people, we’re living in a genuine age of wonders, here.