Origins
The term "Guru Meditation Error" was an in-house joke from Amiga's early days. One of the company's products was the Joyboard, a game controller much like a joystick but operated by one's feet, similar to the modern-day Wii Balance Board. Early in the development of the Amiga computer operating system, the company's developers became so frustrated with the system's frequent crashes that, as a relaxation technique, a game was developed where a person would sit cross-legged on the joyboard, resembling an Indian guru. The player was supposed to remain perfectly still with the goal of the game being to stay still the longest. If the player moved, a "guru meditation" error resulted. A similar game is the final unlockable balance activity in Wii Fit.
The error was removed from subsequent versions of the Amiga ROM (Kickstart), but some users chose to patch it back in.
Read more about this topic: Guru Meditation
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)