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Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga home computers when they crashed. It is analogious to the blue screen of death in the Microsoft Windows operating system.
When a Guru Meditation is displayed the computer runs the ROMWhack debugger, which is accessible by connecting a 9600 bps terminal to the serial port. This makes it possible to have a look at the contents of the machine and determine what made it crash.
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, programmed in ROM:s known as Kickstart 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, the errors are always red.
This error is sometimes referred to as "trip to India" or just "alert".
The alert occurrs when there was a fatal problem with the system. The operating system had no path to recovery, and displayed the alert. Alerts could be displayed even in an extremely broken system, and even if memory was exhausted.
The error is displayed as two fields, separated by a period. The first field is either the Motorola 68000 exception number that occurred or an internal error identifier (such as an 'Out of Memory' code). The second is the instruction counter that the exception or error occurred at.
Knowledgeable people would know that (for example) exception 2 was an address error, and meant you were accessing a word on an unaligned boundary. Folks without this specialized knowledge found the messages completely confusing, and would either look for a Guru or (more generally) simply reboot the machine.
The term comes from the early days of the Amiga corporation, and is partly an in-house joke. One of the early products produced by Amiga was the joyboard, a game controller much like a joystick but supposed to be operated by your feet. It was sold with the skiing game Mogul Maniac for the Atari 2600 game computer. When the Amiga OS crashed, the programmer working with it would sit down cross-legged on the joyboard, trying to keep it in balance thus resembling an Indian guru.
The Guru meditation error was removed from subsequent versions of the Amiga ROM (Kickstart), but some users choose to patch it back in.
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