Guru Meditation

The term "Guru Meditation Error" was an in-house joke from Amiga's early days.

The Guru Meditation is an error notice displayed by early versions of the Commodore Amiga computer when they crashed.

Near the end it morphed into an oldschool demo and crashed with a Guru Meditation, followed by an Amiga-like reboot.

This is where the infamous Guru Meditation error originates from in earlier versions of the AmigaOS operating system.

In most cases, it is possible to resume work and save files after a Recoverable Alert, while a normal, red Guru Meditation always results in an immediate reboot.

It was able to deal with many kinds of errors and gave the user a choice to either remove the offending process and associated screen or allow the machine to show the Guru Meditation.

On the Commodore Amiga, system crashes are always indicated by a black window with a red flashing border at the top of the screen with the words "Guru Meditation" and a number.

Its border and text is red for a normal Guru Meditation, or green/yellow for a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation.

When a Guru Meditation is displayed, the options are to reboot by pressing the left mouse button, or to invoke ROMWack by pressing the right mouse button.

In homage to this, Ian Bogost, founder of video game developer Persuasive Games, has developed the video game Guru Meditation in an attempt "to create a legitimate zen meditation game".

The Grim Reaper: The "Guru Meditation" is replaced by "The Grim Reaper", a crash handling system that attempts to catch crashes and attempts to stop them from getting out of control.

It was designed by Californian surfers who loved the B-52s (the first motherboard was called the Rock Lobster, and when the machine crashed, up popped a sign saying "Guru Meditation Error"), and it was a dream in beige plastic.

BSOD - shows fake fatal screen of death variants from many computer systems, including Microsoft Windows Blue Screen of Death, a Linux kernel panic, a Darwin crash, an Amiga "Guru Meditation" error, a sad Mac, and more.