U.S. patent 1,048,576 1970 January 1. "A method for distributed editing of publications with micropayment incentives", Knuth D. E.
[Edit: I just picked a computationally relevant number that approximates the patent counter circa the epoch.]
How so? What if you released something in the public domain and made it unpatentable?
Of course, Knuth is notorious for his "churning out" of books; though none are as rigorous as his early VB6 stuff.
TAOCP sounds tragically hip, when described like that.