Originally Posted by JFarrell71
That's when the term was coined and books began to be overtly labeled as such, but the roots of Steampunk are widely considered to be much deeper, going back to actual Victorian era science fiction writers like Verne and Wells (it makes sense that their vision of the future would resemble their present, after all)

Yes, the roots. But those aren't steampunk themselves, they just have a similar aesthetic to (and influenced) steampunk. They're precursors.
In the same way that cybernetics, VR, networking, etc in SF predate cyberpunk, but don't make those particular stories cyberpunk. They have elements that make them precursors to cyberpunk. (And interestingly, that term wasn't even termed by one of the biggies like Gibson or Sterling, but by Bruce Bethke, after the fact, much like Jeter did)*

*Edit: okay, wrong there too. My memory is shit.
First used by Bethke as a story title, Dozois picked it up as a term and ran with it.
(I've never read the Bethke story, but I tried to read Headcrash and failed to finish it.)