Helen Keller mode

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 intodeep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose successat learning speech was triumphant.) See also go flatline,catatonic.

Helen Keller mode

(2)On IBM PCs under MS-DOS, refers to a specific failuremode in which a screen saver has kicked in over anill-behaved application which bypasses the very interruptsthe screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are totry to get from the program's current state through asuccessful save-and-exit without being able to see what you'redoing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictlyspeaking) a crash.