Technology Meets Touch

It might be said that a pen is the polar opposite of a computer: Where one is high tech, the other is high touch. But a couple of savvy companies are combining the spirit of technology with the mechanics of a pen. Cartier’s newest Pasha de Cartier fountain pen, roller ball, or ballpoint ($1,150, $900, and $770) is decorated with computer-circuit-board-like engraving. The Omas 360 ($1,500) has been reinterpreted with guilloche engraving on its three sides. Two sides are reminiscent of the first hard disk made in 1956; the third shows detail of the design of the CRAY X1 supercomputer created in 2003. This supercomputer is capable of carrying out 52.4 thousand billions of operations a second, which, in my estimation, could make writing—and even thinking—totally obsolete.

www.cartier.com
www.omas.com