Just for the record: Knuth had already published the first three volumes of TAOCP in 1968, 1969, 1973 respectively, and had then brought out the second edition of Vol 1 in 1973, and had already won a Turing award for them in 1974 — it was only in 1977 for the second edition of Volume 2 when the publishers' printing technology had become worse (from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting) that he decided to take up the problem, excited at having recently learned of digital typesetters.

That might have been the right call in ‘78. The first word processor ever only went on sale two years prior.

Publishing software capable of more than Word, not a plain text editor capable of less, the opposite ends of the spectrum