Yea, run an old kernel with ext2 on a busy system writing a bunch of small files and have a power supply fail and you'll end up with something there.

fsck on large hard drives was scary on how long it could take to finish.

The occassional "Drive has not been checked in <n> days, forcing check" message on bootup got annoying sometimes, yeah. It could easily take tens of minutes to finish, exactly when I wanted to use the computer!

(At least this is what my memory is telling me. I could be mistaken, but that's what I remember.)