As my very fragile nth edition photocopy shows, the original Western Electric copies are not troff'ed and run through a typesetter because John (like most of us at the time) did not have access to one (and Tom Ferrin had not yet done the vcat(1) hack at UCSF). Lions used standard nroff output - (in this case, originally to 132 column line printer paper I believe).
Indeed. Even the mid-90's Peer-to-Peer press reprinting appears to be, roughly, a facsimile of line printer output. I say 'roughly' because there is some prefatory material at the beginning that is properly typeset: dedications, acknowledgements, etc, all written at the time of (re)publication and similarly a set of "appreciations" at the end.
Interestingly, the title page appears to be approximately original and is typeset. It also includes this little gem of a note: "COPY NO. 050B NAME PROPERTY OF BELL LABORATORIES, INC. COPY TO BE RETURNED TO: COMPUTING INFORMATION SERVICE MH 2F-128 UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM SOURCE CODE VERSION 6" (line breaks elided).
I don't think I've ever seen a copy of the original; I suspect the title page was reset for the PP publication, though it is of course possible that Lions could have prepared that specially: doing a "one-off" for a single page, perhaps under contract with an actual publishing company or graphic artist or something, would have been reasonable while the rest of the booklet contents were taken from listings.
- Dan C.