Urban legend: The billion dollar pen

There is a joke that keeps on making the rounds, about how NASA discovered that normal pen does not work in space, and then spent a huge amount of money in research and developing a pen that works in space; and what did the Russians do ? Well, they did not waste money like this, and instead used a normal pencil.
Well, as the linked article (link) shows, this is an urban legend with no basis in truth. Read the complete article to find out:

The story goes like this: in the 1960s, NASA astronauts discovered that their pens did not work in zero gravity. So like good engineers, they went to work and designed a wonder pen. It worked upside down. It worked in vacuum. It worked in zero gravity. It even worked underwater! And it only cost a million dollars! The crafty Russians used a pencil.
This story, like most modern urban legends, has proliferated on the Internet, but it has also been passed by word of mouth. I’ve even heard a well-known space historian tell the story while talking about his new book, getting the expected laugh from his audience when he held up a Number 2 pencil for the punchline. And, of course, the story has also been embellished, with the cost of the writing device getting ever higher, from a million dollars to a hundred million dollars to a billion dollars in some variations. Undoubtedly at some point the cost will equal the mythical trillion-dollar price of a mission to Mars.