Back when I was working in the game industry in the '80s, my boss said that he had found an Amiga emulator for the Atari. I went down to look. He booted up the emulator and it immediately displayed a Guru Meditation error. “See?” He said. “Just like an Amiga!” Then he laughed heartily.
When one of the VIPs at Commodore said, “The guru doesn’t fly at General Motors,” I thought they were going to finally address the issue, but they didn’t.
One of the programmers at Commodore was very nice to us. She gave us a pre-release of the programming language which started our program automatically when the machine booted. Without it the project would have failed.
When I visited a local Amiga club I complained about how crash-prone the Amiga was. They protested that it wasn’t crash-prone. When the guru meditation error inevitably appeared I said, “There, it crashed.” The guy enigmatically said, “That wasn’t a crash.”
I programmed an Amiga for a display at the museum of science and industry. On that project I timed the crashes. There was one approximately every 15 minutes.
This project required a touch screen rather than a mouse. When the program ran, the touch screen was being used and no multitasking was being done. It ran solidly for months without a crash. From this I concluded that it was either the mouse driver causing the crashes or the task switching.
