Zachary Grayson

Dr. King
ENC 1102-0016L
10/18/12
A Main Contributor to Computer Science

In this post I will be discussing the effects that a a

person can have on a discourse community and what it takes to become such a huge factor inside
of a discourse community. Computer Science is an extremely fast pace discourse community in
the fact that everything and anything can change at any second. In this discourse community
there are always new trends being started because of the fact that this discourse community
moves at such a fast pace rate, and a great deal of these trends came into play because of Steve
Jobs.
Steve Jobs is one of the most world famous people for the inventions and technological
advancements that he came up with during his life. He was the CEO of Apple for eleven years
before he passed away this last October. After dropping from college he then decided that he was
going to stay at a friends dorm and live on his floor for the next eighteen months. During this
time he decided to audit classes, and the class that was the most influential was calligraphy. He
has said, If I had never dropped on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would
have never had multiple type daces or proportionally spaced fonts (Faughnder). This idea of
different fonts was a huge introduction the world of computer science because he was the first
person that had done such a thing with computers.
In 1974, Jobs took a job at Atari as a technician in Los Gatos, California. That year he went to go
visit India to see Neem Karoli Baba, who was known as a guru that Americans would come to

visit. He spent the next seven months in India and then came back to America to start work at
Atari again. He also had picked up some new habits when he returned to America like Zen
Buddhism and taking psychedelics like LSD. He said, one of the two or three most important
things [he had] done in [his] life. Jobs said that LSD helped open his mind and give him a great
deal of the ideas that he had throughout the rest of his life.
In 1971, Bill Fernandez introduced Jobs to Steve Wozniak and from this moment on they became
long time friends. In 1974, Jobs was told by Atari to make the circuit board smaller by reducing
the number of chips that it needed. He asked Wozniak for help and they reduced it by fifty chips
which was actually so small that machines were not capable of mass producing them. This was
the start of great partnership being built.
In 1976, they formed Apple Computer Company and they started off by selling circuit boards.
Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne worked in the garage of Jobs parents home making the
circuit boards and computers. Wozniak made the Apple 1 by himself. They started to run out of
money so Jobs found Mike Markkula a semi-retired Intel product marketing manager that was
willing to give them funding (Lemke).
.In 1978, Mike Scoot was named CEO of Apple Computer Company and he had come from the
National Semiconductor. In 1980, Jobs saw a commercial that was about the Xerox Parcs mouse
driven graphical user interface which led to him creating Apple Lisa which is a personal
computer. In 1981, Jef Raskin invented Macintosh which was later introduced by Jobs in 1984.
In 1983, John Sculley became CEO after Jobs had asked him to please do this instead of continue
working for Pepsi-Cola. Two years after being CEO Sculley had a meeting to take Jobs off from
being head of the Macintosh division. Jobs followed by resigning five months later from Apple
completely. In 2005, Jobs gave a speech at Stanford University and said, he said being fired
from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him; The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It
freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. And he added, Im pretty sure
none of this would have happened if I hadnt been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting
medicine, but I guess the patient needed it (Stanford). In 1985, when Jobs had resigned he
decided to start his own company again and created NeXT Inc (Butcher).
In 1986, Jobs decided to by The Graphics Group from Lucasfilms computer games. The
companies name later changed to Pixar. The first movie that they created was Toy Story which
became a huge success by much more than they had imagined. During the time of making Toy
Story Jobs had considered selling Pixar to other companies but after making a deal with Disney
he deiced to not sell Pixar and to actually become its CEO.
Jobs was able to get a huge investment from billionaire Ross Perot which allowed Jobs to created
the NeXT workstations in 1990 which were priced at $9,999, and then later that year created the

second generation NeXTcube. He believed that the NeXTcube would get rid of the personal
computer and change how people would work together through computers. He then created a
framework web application which he used in great deal later on. Apple decided to by NeXT in
1996 for $427 million. Jobs then decided to come back to Apple and he then used ideas that he
had gotten from NeXTSTEP to create Mac OS X. With this the company started to have a huge
increase in sales of the iMac. In 2000, Jobs became CEO of Apple, and at this point he was a
huge person in the world now for being CEO of two huge and successful
companies(Deutshchman).

As CEO of Apple Jobs created many new inventions that has revolutionized the discourse of
computer science in a drastic way. Hecreated the iPod which is a portable music device that
stores songs on it instead of caring around CDs. He then created iTunes in which he used the
framework application that he had created at NeXT. ITunes is an online store in which you can
buy individual songs, albums, movies, eBooks, applications, and podcasts.

In 2006, Jobs decided to start offering new ways of recycling the e-waste that he was creating by
making these inventions. He also decided to sell Pixar to Disney or $7.4 billion and was also
given 7% of shares. He was then the largest individual shareholder and decided to join the Board
of Directors at Disney. In 2007, he created the iPhone which revolutionized the cell phone
industry. This is one of the most popular multitasking cell phones out there to date. In 2010, Jobs
announced that Apple was creating the iPad which is a tablet that basically acts as an extremely
portable laptop(Isaacson).

Steve Jobs has given the discourse of computer science many new ideas. With these new
ideas we are trying to expand our discourse community to larger and better things and continue
on with Jobs thinking of new inventions. Some people say that his ideas are flawed and do not
work but over the years he has proven everyone who has said that wrong. He also never seized to
amaze everyone with his new inventions to the discourse community of computer science.

Bibliography
Butcher, Lee. Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer. New
York: Paragon House, 1988. Print.
Deutschman, Alan. The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. New York: Broadway Books, 2000. Print.
Faughnder, Ryan. "Jobs's Pentagon Papers: Kidnap Fears, Drug use and a Speeding Ticket." The
Sydney Morning Herlad 12 June 2012: Web. 4 Nov. 2012.
<http://archive.is/20120916/http://www.smh.com>.
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print
Lemke, Donald B. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and the Personal Computer. Mankato, Minn:
Capstone Press, 2007. Print.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says." Stanford University News: Web. 2 Nov. 2012.
<http://archive.is/20120711/http://news-service.stanford.edu>.