Guru Meditation

Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurs on Amiga computers when they crash. It is similar to the blue screen of death in the Microsoft Windows operating system.

It appears as black rectangular box that appears in the upper part of the screen. Its border and text is red when it is a normal Guru Meditation, or orange when it is a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation. The screen goes black immediately before the error appears. In AmigaOS 1.x, the errors are always red.

This error is sometimes referred to as "trip to India" or just "alert".

Origin of the term: (taken from http://www.houghi.org/jargon/guru-meditation (http://www.houghi.org/jargon/guru-meditation)) 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).