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Interesting… you are first-person witness to technology history! I am a history buff, and I’ve always had a desire to be able to get tangibly close to history.

For example, we have a little-known museum up here in Massachusetts called the World War II Museum. If you didn’t know what was, you have no idea what was inside.

Nobody seems to know about it, and you can’t you show up… you have to contact the people who run the museum and arrange a time to visit, and tell them why you want to visit. They don’t allow anyone under 18 (but I’m sure that’s a rule they would bend)

When you get inside, they follow you around, and once they see you treat the artifacts with respect, you can pretty much pick up and handle nearly anything if you have a pair of cotton gloves with you. Really, really interesting stuff. All kinds of weapons, and things like that. They have one of the copies the treaty of Versailles, the bronze bust of Hitler that was taken from the Eagles Nest in Berchtesgaden… it still had the urine stains on it from Gen. Patton’s pit bull that he trained to pee on it when he took it out for a walk (they use it for doorstop) But my favorite artifact for some reason was in a cylindrical box on the table. When I opened the box, it was a top hat. It was the top that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had worn to his inauguration. When I pulled that thing out and held it in my hands, I felt an incredibly strong bond to real, honest to goodness history! (By the way, I’m no fan of FDR, but the history quotient was pretty high there…)

When I read your anecdote about meeting Steve Jobs before he really made it big, basically when he was still trying to fight his way out of the paper bag so to speak, I think I would look back on that as equivalent to holding that top hat in my hands… :-)