guru meditation

n. Amiga equivalent of panic in Unix (sometimes just called a guru or guru
event ). When the system crashes, a cryptic message of the form GURU
MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY may appear, indicating what the problem was.
An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a guru event
must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch. This term is (no surprise) an
in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. An earlier product of the Amiga
corporation was a device called a Joyboard which was basically a plastic
board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game
cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype
OS crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by
concentrating on a solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying
to keep the board in balance. This position resembled that of a meditating
guru. Sadly, the joke was removed fairly early on (but there's a well-known
patch to restore it in more recent versions).

