The communal spirit of Unix as described by Ritchie back in the day revolves around minicomputers (aka PDP-11) shared in a single organisation, accessible via multiple terminals. A close community of users would log into the system and would eventually come up with their own small tools for a particular purpose. Those oddly-named tools would be adopted by the small community without need for extensive documentation. This is the "Unix spirit" of the 1970s that everyone seems to be referring to.