Amiga Guru Meditation Error Animated GIF

The famous Amiga Guru Meditation Error screen, in animated GIF form.

I finally got around to whipping up a full screen rendition of the Amiga Workbench “Guru Meditation Error” screen as an animated GIF. For those not familiar with ‘the Guru’, the original Amiga concept was for a video game console which could be turned into a computer.  Early in the development of the system, the engineering team constructed a controller called the “Joyboard”, similar to a Wii Balance Board, and a simple game which detected movement on the Joyboard.  The game involved the player sitting on the Joyboard, in a stereotypical cross-legged guru meditation position, and when the player did move, the game would announce their turn had ended on a ‘guru meditation error’.

Although the Joyboard was dropped when the Amiga concept moved towards a personal computer, this in-house joke survived, making it into the AmigaOS as a sort of easter egg. When early Amiga (Workbench 1.x) systems would suffer from a crash, and the flashing “Software Failure” screen would appear.  The numbers were helpful hints to developers as to why the software crashed.

This download is a 640×480 animated GIF, enjoy!

Download · File size = 3.3 KB · Download Count: 281

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