Helen Keller mode
1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e.
accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or
some other excursion into deep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose
success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also go flatline, catatonic.
2. On IBM PCs under MS-DOS, refers to a specific failure mode in which a screen
saver has kicked in over an ill-behaved application which bypasses the very
interrupts the screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get
from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit without
being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't
(strictly speaking) a crash.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
heavy wizardry « Hebbian learning « heisenbug «
Helen Keller mode » Helix » hello packet »
hello, sailor!
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