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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. 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 fairly early on (but there's
a well-known patch to restore it in more recent versions).
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