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

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.