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Guru Meditation
  • 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. Generally 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. There used to be 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 in AmigaOS 2. 04 (actually in 2. 00, a buggy post-2. 0 release on the A3000 only).