But will it hold value? 100 years from now, no one will be alive who remembers Steve Jobs. Jobs will be a historic figure, not a memory. Does this make the paper more or less valuable?
I think that will be dependent of the fortunes of the Apple brand. Currently they're one of the top few famous brand names, which is why the contents of Steve Jobs' trash is so valuable. 100 years from now they may be forgotten, the household name for nanofibre cleaning cloths, or remembered only as those things that grew on trees - back when there were trees - which grandpa said tasted much better than rat.
Jobs certainly didn't invent the personal computer. Neither did IBM (the only "innovative" things about the IBM PC were that it had a really good keyboard, said "IBM" in large friendly letters on the front and came with a knock-off version of the already established CP/M operating system - otherwise it was a "me too" CPM-86 machine). The first "commercially successful" personal computer was arguably the
MITS Altair from 1975 - although it probably wasn't the absolute first. The term "personal computer" was certainly in use by 1978 (at best, the IBM PC
may have popularised the 'PC' abbreviation) - see e.g.
https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Pe.../Personal-Computer-World-Vol.1-No.1-S-OCR.pdf
At best, the Apple 1 was the one of the first systems with an on-board video output and keyboard interface (so you didn't need to scour the electronics fairs for a surplus teletype or VT100 terminal) and the Apple II was
one of the first personal computers packaged as an "appliance" suitable for people who didn't own a soldering iron (but other famous systems like the Commodore Pet, TRS-80 and a dozen other forgotten names appeared within a few months).
BTW, Herman Hollerith, invented the punched card
Joseph Marie Jacquard would like a word with you.
...as would Charles Babbage.
The programmable electronic computer was mostly invented by
Tommy Flowers although Alan Turing probably earned his place on the £50 note for other important considerations.
The first
business computer was developed by a
British tea shop chain.
Then 90 years later in 1981 his company released the "IBM PC" and invented personal computing.
Which is nonsense but a good example of how history gets rewritten.
Apple's real legacy has been
popularising things that they didn't invent - particularly the graphical user interface, digital music players and the smartphone, not to mention investing in a whacky British processor chip called the ARM.
I suspect that generally, any historical claim that "this person invented X" is usually simplistic to the point of being wrong.
