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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. |
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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 in AmigaOS 2.04 (actually in 2.00, a buggy post-2.0 release on the A3000 only). |
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gweep /gweep/ [WPI] 1. v. To hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards, one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at the time opines that the term was originally onomatopoetic, describing the keyclick sound of the Datapoint terminals long connected to the PDP-10. The term has survived the demise of those technologies, however, and was still alive in late 1991. "I'm going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning." "I gweep from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week." 2. n. One who habitually gweeps in sense 1; a hacker. "He's a hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep." |
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