Some context here - unix of the day was actually tiny, designed to fit in 64k and run on a pdp-11. File systems weren't that unrobust .... but fsck was new and

Some context here - unix of the day was actually tiny, designed to fit in 64k and run on a pdp-11. File systems weren't that unrobust .... but fsck was new and probably not well trusted, prior to that file systems had to be fixed manually