2066 Crist Drive

I was searching something else in Los Altos on Google when "Steve Jobs' house" popped up in the suggested search bar. Of course I clicked on it and found that his boyhood home, where he actually founded the first iteration of the Apple Computer company with Steve Wozniak, was up the street from our house. 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos.

I drove there after dropping the kids off at school, which is about a mile up the road the other way. Here it is:

The remarkable thing about this experience is how unremarkable it was, not that the house itself needs to be important or interesting, but that the street was quiet, no one there but me and a couple of gardeners, and it's right off a main thoroughfare near a shopping complex with a Trader Joe's. The house itself was protected as a "historical resource" by the Historical Society of Los Altos in late 2013 and the only indication that you are in the right place once you get there is that there are small, discreet signs in two or three locations on the property that indicate that your presence is being recorded by surveillance cameras.

Jobs lived there from 7th grade through high school and assembled the first set of Apple 1's there in 1976 -- with Woz. You can't help but wonder what synapses fired in what sequence in his brain as a result of living here, but the connection between Apple and the orchards is, according to Steve himself, not a coincidence.

From Walter Isaacson's biography: "On the naming of Apple, he said he was 'on one of my fruitarian diets.' He said he had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

It was the All-One "commune"/farm in Oregon, where Steve had friends and visited on occasion. They grew apples there. To me "Apple" also suggests portability, accessibility, simplicity and color. Branding genius? We'll never know whether it had anything to do with Apple Records (marketers know, brand confusion CAN work in your favor); whatever it was, it works.