Guru Meditation error message, the short answer to what it is

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Guru Meditation error message from the Commodore Amiga

The red flashing screen of error on the Commodore Amiga.

Have you ever had an old Commodore Amiga? Then you most likely have experienced the red flashing error message known as the “Guru Meditation”.

Guru_meditation

Sad Mac error symbol for the old Macintosh
Sad Mac error symbol for the old Macintosh

It´s analogous to the “Blue Screen Of Death” in the Microsoft Windows, the “Sad Mac” on old Macintosh computers or the “Kernel Panic” error message in Unix systems.

The short story behind the error message is that when something went wrong in the execution of the code the developers wanted a way to tell the more advanced users, the gurus, how to find the error. The error is displayed as two fields, separated by a period. The format is #0000000x.yyyyyyyy in case of a CPU error, or #aabbcccc.dddddddd in case of a system software error.

There is a longer story behind the “Guru Meditation” error message and here is the link to the YouTube video “The making of Amiga Guru Meditation”, around 2 minutes in the clip RJ Mical talks about the origin of the error message.

Read more about the Guru Meditation error message at Wikipedia

Error message from the old Macintosh computer
Error message from the old Macintosh computer

Annons

About Retro Mike 88 Articles
Retro Mike. Computer Kid of the 70's. Commodore collector, retrocomputer entusiast and part-time blogger/tweeter of cool technology and nostalgia.

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