Steve Jobs, Aspen, a Lost Time Capsule, and Me
As we get closer to the season premiere of the National Geographic Channel’s show, Diggers, where I will make my national TV debut, I have been inundated with questions on how all this came to be. The story is quite detailed, but for those of you who are wondering, I will give you a summary here. First, here is the sneak peek of the upcoming Diggers episode set to air tomorrow February 25th at 9 PM. I am featured toward the end of the clip.
In 2011, my client John Celuch gave me a cassette tape of a Steve Jobs speech he attended in Aspen, Colorado back in 1983. Steve Jobs delivered this speech as part of a yearly design conference that John had attended for several years. Once I finally got around to listening to the speech and realizing that virtually no copies of this speech were available on the Internet, I digitized the speech and posted an article about it on one of my blogs in October 2012. The article went viral and received a lot of attention. The speech is pretty amazing and you can read the article I wrote about The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech of 1983 by clicking here.
While I was preparing to post my article about the speech, John Celuch told me a story about the design conference in 1983. That year the theme of the conference was about the future. In keeping with the theme, Steve Jobs was there to talk about the personal computer revolution and the conference organizers also wanted to bury a time capsule. After John heard Steve Jobs’ speech, he personally asked Jobs if he wanted to donate something to the time capsule. Jobs gave him the mouse from the Lisa computer he used during the speech. The time capsule (technically a 13-foot long PVC “tube”) was buried in Aspen with the intention of digging it up in the year 2000. However, by the year 2000 the conference had faded away so no one was really in charge of recovering the time tube. In addition, the records detailing the exact location of the time capsule were missing. No real effort was made to recover the time tube so it remained buried and lost. I wrote an article about the “Lost” Aspen Time Tube as a follow up to the Steve Jobs speech, which you can read by clicking here.
The article about the Aspen Time Tube received some attention, but not nearly as much as the article about the “Lost” Steve Jobs speech. I wrote in the article that I would have loved to see the time capsule, along with Steve Jobs’ mouse, recovered in the year 2013, exactly 30 years after it was buried. Nothing much transpired for several months but luckily the article caught the attention of the producers of the show Diggers in early 2013. They were interested in recovering the time tube for an episode of their show. After being contacted by the show’s producers, I gave them the information I had and put them in touch with John Celuch. I didn’t hear much else for a few more months but eventually John let me know that the show was on track to film in September and we were invited to participate in the recovery of the time tube. So in September of last year John and I took a trip to Aspen and we helped recover the lost time tube.
I can’t give too many details of the show until it airs, so watch the episode of Diggers when it airs February 25 at 9 PM Central Time on the National Geographic Channel. After the show airs I will be able to reveal my own personal photos and video I took during the filming and fill in my own experiences.