You can hardly blame the town elders in Los Altos for designating Steve Jobs’ childhood home an historic resource. There’s tourism money in the short-term future. But for how many decades will Jobs be recalled and revered? Edwin Land was once just as big an icon. From Jason Green at the Mercury News:

“Steve Jobs built the first 100 Apple 1 computers at the Crist Drive home with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Patricia Jobs. The first 50 were sold to Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in Mountain View for $500 each, according to the evaluation. The rest were assembled for their friends in the Homebrew Computer Club.

‘I’d get yelled at if I bent a prong,’ Patricia Jobs told The Daily News in an interview last month.

The original computers are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. One sold for $213,000 at an auction in 2010.

The home is also where Jobs courted some of his first investors, including Chuck Peddle of Commodore Computer and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, according to the evaluation.

The first partnership for Apple Computer Co. was signed on April 1, 1976, and nine months later the company was established and operations moved to nearby Cupertino.

‘These significant events took place at the subject property,’ Commissioner Sapna Marfatia wrote in the evaluation.”