Calculator Wars at your School

[Steve Simpkin]

(06-28-2021 05:03 PM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  

(06-28-2021 03:07 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hello!


On some special occasion ("cresima" maybe) I got a ballpoint pen from Aurora as a present (one like these - I still have it, never thought it was so expensive: https://www.aurorapen.it/prodotto/030-penna-a-sfera/). But these were sold in jeweller's shops rather than the stationary shops around the corner. I am pretty sure that the stationary shop in our village only had Pelikan fountain pens.
I had a quick look around the Aurora website and didn't find a pen for less than 100 Euros - not something "normal people" would buy their children for school - for comparaison, a "Pelikano" school pen costs around 10 Euros.

Very similar to HP <> Ti/Casio/Sharp/...

Saluti
Max

I had an Aurora set (ballpoint + fountain pen) for my Comunione/Cresima, surely not so expensive! At least back in May '68.

Reading all of this I was very surprised to learn that fountain pens were still in use. Going through the U.S. School system in California from 1967 to 1980 and then 4 years of collage, I only used a fountain pen once for an art class project. In school we mostly used #2 wooden pencils which were required for the "Scantron" machine-readable answer cards we often used during multiple-choice tests. Ball point pens were occasionally required for certain assignments but pencils were the main writing instrument. Since I discovered mechanical pencils in the early 1980's, I have used them exclusively except for the rare time when I need to sign something with a ball point pen. For the past few decades I haven't used either that often (other than for taking notes) as most of the writing I do now is on a computer.