4 Mar
2023
4 Mar
'23
8:45 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 03, 2023 at 02:35:37PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
It is difficult to determine when fsck appeared in the USG releases.
fsck was perhaps present in USG Program Generic PG-1C300 Issue 3
(March 1977), as it was in the MERT Release 0 manual:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Manuals/MERT_Release_0/Unix%20Pr…
"I would like to thank Larry A. Wehr for advice that lead to the first
version of fsck and Rick B. Brandt for adapting fsck to UNIX/TS."
T. J. Kowalski, FSCK - The UNIX/TS File System Check Program
included in System III manuals
'Credit for the various pieces involved goes to Ted Kowalski of CMU and
BTL, Mike Accetta of CMU, and George Goble of Purdue Univ. Kowalski
wrote the "fsck," file system check program, which does all that
icheck/dcheck did and more and also repairs errors that it finds. In the
Purdue V6 system Goble had added code to ensure that inodes and indirect
blocks on disk were always in a consistent state so that the worst that
could happen in a sudden halt or crash was that the file system may have
some dups in free, but never dups between files. Accetta enhanced these
and added a few of his own.
In the current Berkeley distribution (4BSD) all of these techniques are
provided as well as some additions.'
Bill Joy, A Crash-resistant UNIX file system
https://archive.org/details/login_january-1981/page/30/mode/2up
Interesting. I wonder how 'fcheck' made
it from CMU to Bell?
The late Ted Kowaski - the primary author. Undergrad EE UMICH (Bill Joy's
roommate) and Grad EE at CMU (and my programming/lab partner originally in
Dan Sieworick's grad RT course and Gordon Bell System Architecture
courses). MTS and TSS had a disk scavenger from IBM for their common FS
[which Ted has used at MICH and I had CMU]. icheck/ncheck/dcheck seemed
less useful.
A new program was started when he was an undergrad and never finished.
It had more colorful name originally - fsck (pronounced as fisk BTW) was
finished. I suspect the fcheck name was a USG idea. The reason why many
of the error messages are upper case is that was the IBM convention which
both MTS and TSS used for system programs.