In a movie I saw recently, a young Will Shakespeare was seen to repeatedly dip the nib of a quill into a reservoir of ink and scrawl on pieces of paper until, finally, what we know as "Romeo and Juliet" was penned. As pointed out by Richard Piner, Jin Zhu, Feng Xu, Seunghun Hong, and Chad Mirkin, this technology is much older than Shakespeare, dating back about 4000 years. But even technology this old can change.

As you are well aware, making devices on a smaller and smaller scale (nanofabrication) is certain to change our future way of life, Nanofabrication frequently relies on lithographic methods where a pattern is superimposed on a resistive film and the film is chemically etched to create a structure that conforms to the pattern.