We Can't Wait to Find Out What Steve Jobs Left in His Tech Time Capsule

Alyssa Bereznak
·National Correspondent, Technology
stevejobs
stevejobs

Thirty years ago, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs buried his computer mouse underground in a time capsule as part of the 1983 Aspen International Design Conference.

Unfortunately, keeping track of a giant metal tube was not an expertise of the Aspen International Design Conference organizers. They promptly lost it, due to some landscaping work in the area.

This past summer, however, the National Geographic program Diggers found and excavated the time capsule, which features Jobs’ mouse and other “potentially priceless” items.

So: What happened? And what’s in that time capsule, besides a primitive-looking mouse?

Well, to find out, you’ll have to watch the Diggers program Feb. 25 (preview, via CNET, above).

The backstory on the capsule is more readily available: In 1983, Jobs gave a now-famous talk at the Aspen International Design Conference, in which he predicted technologies that Apple would later champion: tablets, wireless networking and a digital marketplace like the App Store. Throughout the speech, he navigated the presentation with a mouse on his Apple Lisa computer.

After the conference, he bundled the mouse, along with a bunch of other plastic-baggied items, and buried them away in that year’s “Aspen Time Tube.”

And then the landscaping, and the misplacement, happened. So, instead of excavating the time capsule in 2000 as planned, the tube went on with its peaceful underground life until the National Geographic Diggers team got it out this summer. By then, people had started calling it the “Steve Jobs Time Capsule.” It took the Guy Fieri-esque Diggers team two hours to unearth the tube and saw off its cap, and they squealed with excitement throughout the entire process.

Then, as Diggers co-host Tim Saylor described to CNET, “things just poured out. There must be literally thousands of things in there.”

So what else you got? A Windows 1.0 box? An HP touch computer? I’m dying to know. And I guess I’ll find out when the whole episode airs Feb. 25.

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