On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 10:07 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
    > From: Clem Cole

    > it was was originally written for the for the 6th edition FS (which I
    > hope I have still have the sources in my files) ...
    > I believe Noel recovered a copy in his files recently.

Well, I have _something_. It's called 'fcheck', not 'fsck', but it looks like
what we're talking about - maybe it was originally named, or renamed, to be in
the same series as {d,i,n}check? But it does have the upper-case error
messages... :-) Anyway, here it is:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s1/fcheck.c
  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man8/fcheck.8

fcheck ---> aka fsick  -- aka fsck -- that's it.
 


Interestingly, the man page for it makes reference to a 'check' command, which
I didn't recall at all; here it is:

  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/s1/check.c
  http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/man8/check.8

for those who are interested.


    > Noel has pointed out that MIT had it in the late 1970s also, probably
    > brought back from BTL by one of their summer students.

I think most of the Unix stuff we got from Bell (e.g. the OS, which is clearly
PWB1, not V6) came from someone who was in a Scout unit there in high school,
Jon Stienhart maybe???   He & Paul Rubinfield were in that scout group years ago and were both long time UNIX hackers, but I've forgotten where Stienhart did his undergrad.

of all bizarre connections! ISTR this came the same way, but maybe I'm wrong.
It definitely arrived later than the OS - we'd be using icheck/dcheck for
quite a while before it arrived - so maybe it was another channel?
​ This is Ted's code and my error messages.
 
The only thing that for sure (that I recall) that didn't come this way was
Emacs. Since the author had been a grad student in our group at MIT, I think
you all can guess how we got that!

        Noel

​Clem​