> the charter sought was not merely to write some (unspecified) operating system, but instead to create a system specifically designed for editing and formatting text, what might today be called a ‘word-processing system.’
That's an interesting perspective. Was the shell intended to be a glorified word processor, with tools like sort, uniq, wc? In a documentary from the early 1980s, Kernighan also demonstrates this as a "killer" feature of Unix: