In 1983, Steve Jobs placed his Apple Lisa mouse inside a 13-foot time capsule in Colorado; after construction erased its location, crews finally excavated it in 2014

Steve Jobs once gave away the mouse from his own computer. He didn’t sell it, he didn’t lose it; he buried it on purpose. And for the next three decades, nobody could find it. This isn't a rumor. According to The Aspen Times, the local newspaper that has covered this story since the 1980s, the whole story is well-documented, from the original burial ceremony to the day a TV crew finally dug the capsule back up decades later.

A mouse worth saving for the future

On June 23, 1983, organizers of the Aspen International Design Conference held a ceremony to bury a time capsule on the grounds of the Aspen Music Festival and School. The theme for that particular year's conference was, appropriately, "The Future Isn't What It Used to Be." Steve Jobs was one of the speakers. During his speech, he used a mouse from Apple's then-newly launched Lisa computer, one of the first personal computers with a mouse and interactive on-screen icons, an idea that helped shape modern computing interfaces. According to the Computer History Museum, which holds the original Lisa source code, the computer is often described as one of Apple's most influential failures. As the museum's account explains, the Lisa launched at nearly $10,000, far too expensive for most buyers, but its ideas shaped the Macintosh a year later. After his speech, Jobs dropped that same Lisa mouse into a 13-foot metal tube that organizers were preparing to bury along with items from other attendees. The tube became known as the Aspen Time Tube.

Why the capsule went missing for decades

The plan was to dig the capsule back up in 2000. However, it didn't work out as intended. In the years that followed, construction and landscaping altered the grounds surrounding the festival campus, and the markers that had indicated the capsule's exact location were lost with the old layout. By 2000, nobody could say with any confidence where to dig. That's not unusual. According to the International Time Capsule Society, a group founded at Oglethorpe University to monitor capsules around the world, an estimated 80 percent of all time capsules are eventually lost and never opened as planned. The society blames poor record-keeping, changing landscapes, and plain forgetfulness. Aspen's tube was well on its way to joining that list.

How a TV crew finally found it

The capsule sat forgotten until a production crew from the National Geographic program "Diggers" decided to search for it. They worked with Harry Teague, one of the original coordinators who had been involved in hiding the capsule in 1983, and Michael Durkin, an archaeologist, as guides. With the help of the original 1983 survey coordinates and calculations, the crew was able to pinpoint the capsule's possible location. On September 20, 2013, they hit metal. The capsule was still there, buried under decades of new soil. In a statement reported by outlets covering the dig, Teague said he expected the capsule to hold plenty of history, but guessed the Lisa mouse would end up being the item people cared about most, since Jobs had added it "at the last minute." He was right. The story reached a wider audience a few months later, in February 2014, when the "Diggers" episode aired and news outlets picked it up.

What else came out of the ground

The mouse was not the only thing buried. Along with the mouse was a snapshot of the early-1980s era, consisting of an eight-track of the Moody Blues, Sears Roebuck catalog, June 1983 edition of Vogue magazine, Rubik's Cube, and a six-pack of beer. A muffin was also there, along with plans for a fountain designed by Nick DeWolf, an Aspen-based engineer. According to Aspen Times, all of these were recorded and eventually handed over to the Aspen Historical Society for safekeeping.

Why this tiny mouse still matters

It may be tempting to dismiss the idea of a six-pack of beer surviving 30 years underground better than most people's group chats survive a week. But there is more to the Lisa mouse. It represents the moment when personal computers shifted from boxes of toggles to devices you could simply point at and click, a shift the Computer History Museum attributes to the Lisa even though the computer itself never sold well. Standing on that stage in 1983, Jobs probably didn’t know that the mouse in his hand would be buried, forgotten, and dug up again three decades later as a small but legitimate piece of tech history. He probably didn’t expect it to survive the very ground it was buried in, either. But that’s the magic of time capsules. We bury them hoping the future will care. Sometimes, as the Aspen story shows, the future just has to dig a little harder than planned to find out.