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.
   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).

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bomb}]