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]