Linux filesystems weren’t always designed with sober clarity. Legend holds that ext2, once Linux’s dominant filesystem, was sketched out during a particularly heavy drinking session at a local pub in France by developer Rémy Card and friends. A beer-soaked napkin held the initial design specs, hashing out block allocation strategies between rounds of cheap Bordeaux and Cognac. Remarkably, ext2 functioned reliably for decades, serving millions of sober (and hungover) sysadmins worldwide. So next time you fsck your drive, offer a respectful toast: it turns out alcohol-fueled engineering sessions occasionally yield surprisingly robust designs.
