The lost+found directory was a tjk-ism although I can get a very small level of credit/inspiration.  It was born of need.   Ted was explaining to me one night that one of the issues when you had identified a file that no directory was claiming was what to do with it.  Originally, Ted linked lost files into root because there was usually only a couple of files, but ... we startiong seeing a situation where often the root directory did not have free directory slots.

Some of the folks (I want to say it was either bio-med or architecture dept) had a recurring crash that occurred after a bunch of intermediate files had been created on a long running program.  If the program stopped we had a way of restarting it part way using them.   The problem was that people did not clean up the /tmp directory so the program unlinked them after creating them.  But if it crashed, the files were still there but just connected to anything.   Ted could find them with f*ck [it had a different name then]. 

I remember that we talked more about the issue and he came up with the idea of creating the directory lost+found and then preallocating a bunch of slots with a shell script instead of hoping the root directory was going to being available.