James Lilek's current bleat revolves largely around an odd looking pen with separate buttons to extend and retract the pen in its case. He goes into a long riff on how awful an idea this pen was and the little saga that inevitably must have surrounded the production, rise, and fall of this pen in the '60s.
I remember this pen. I remember stumbling across one and it's even geekier multicolor pen cousins (press this button for black, that for blue).
I liked that pen.
It must have had some legs too since the packaging on the bleat screams '60s and we didn't arrive in the 'States until 1971 and I didn't start rummaging around in my dad's engineering stuff until at the earliest the late-70s. In my geeky nostalgia, I wondered, whatever happened to Scripto? It seems, from their current lineup that they've mostly gotten out of the retractable pen business.
What's really funny is how seem to have been taken over by the japanese in 1984 (subsuming the Scripto name into the Tokai corporation) and four years later, they become Scripto-Tokai and currently have their headquarters in California with manufacturing done in Mexico. All in all, an interesting corporate tale for the company founded by the inventor of the mechanical pencil.
Posted by TMLutas at March 18, 2004 02:23 PM