Said originally of diskettes in regard to the Apple ][, but possibly other systems later. The saying comes because on an Apple ][ system booting from a floppy disk, the machine didn't have any instruction governing what it should do if it didn't find any boot code on a disk at start-up. So, if the the disk were uninitialized (AppleSpeak for 'formatted'), the disk drive would spin and spin and spin... forever. This is a direct play on the saying "on a clear day you can see forever."

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