Could Steve Jobs’s childhood home get protected historical status?

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs announces the new iPad against the backdrop of a historical image from the early days of Apple in this 2010 file photo. Steve Jobs and best friend Steve Steve Wozniak built the very first Apple computer in a garage that is now under consideration for historical status. (AFP PHOTO/Ryan Anson)

The future of the house that served as Apple’s first modest headquarters -- and the site where the Apple I was built -- is being debated by Los Atlos City Council Historical Commission.

If all of the commission’s seven-member board are in agreement, then 2066 Crist Drive, in Los Altos, Calif., will become a protected historical site and one that will have to be preserved.

It’s not so much the three-bedroom, two bathroom, single-storey house that is important, but rather its garage, where in 1976, a young Steve Jobs cajoled his best friend, Steve Wozniak into quitting his job and selling his most prized possession (a HP calculator) in order to create their own company and build their own computers.

Apple officially formed on April 1, 1976. And the first 50 examples of the company’s first computer, the Apple I, were hand-built in the garage by the two Steves.

Following the moderate success of that creation, the same garage became the site where Apple Computers was formally incorporated.

Nine months after the birth of the Apple I, the two Steves left Jobs's family home to set up in a rented office in Cupertino – the area where Apple is still headquartered today.

But not before they’d put the family home well and truly on the map and made it one of many stops on the unofficial Steve Jobs pilgrimage that Apple’s most hardcore fans have been taking for many years.