Here’s some info on the writing of Neal Stephenson’s latest book Quicksilver from his new website:
The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was written by hand on 100% cotton paper using three different fountain pens: a Waterman Gentleman, a Rotring, and a Jorg Hysek. It was then transcribed, edited, formatted and printed using emacs and TeX. When it was totally finished, the TeX version of of the ms. was converted to Quark XPress format using an emacs LISP program written by the author. Some share of credit thus goes to the people who made the GNU/Linux operating system and to the originators of LISP.

I just love the idea of that kind of mixture of new and old. Fountain pens and TeX, 100% cotton paper and LISP programs written by the author.