Software developer who built billions
THEY were teenage computer geeks, bespectacled kids from Seattle who taught themselves programming from a teletype terminal, learned the basics of business from Fortune magazine and dreamed of ‘‘a computer in every home and on every desk’’.
Paul Allen (65) was the selfdescribed ‘‘idea man’’, the shy son of librarians. Bill Gates was the businessoriented partner who brought the ideas to life.
And in 1975, when Allen was 22 and Gates was 19, the friends formed a company that became known as Microsoft, and unleashed a personalcomputer revolution that made both men fabulously wealthy.
Allen left the company after only eight years, amid a bout with Hodgkin’s disease and a deteriorating friendship with Gates. But he remained a powerful force in technology and philanthropy for decades, investing his billions in an eclectic array of businesses and charitable efforts while acquiring sports teams, discovering World War 2 shipwrecks, and backing aerospace ventures that drew on his childhood fascination with adventure stories and science fiction.
When Allen and Gates founded Microsoft, computers were bulky and expensive. Microprocessors had been invented just a few years earlier, and most monitors showed nothing but green or white characters on a black screen.
Technology companies were primarily interested in hardware — developing computers that were faster, stronger and smaller than anything that came before.
But Allen and Gates, before most of their peers, realised that the programs a computer ran were just as consequential as the chips and wiring inside the machine.
By the late 1990s, Microsoft operating systems would run on nearly 90% of personal computers in the United States.
Allen had left the company by the time Microsoft unveiled its Windows operating system, and before it released ubiquitous programs such as the textediting software Microsoft Word. But he helped oversee the development of groundbreaking products like the early operating system MSDOS, which launched Microsoft to national prominence through a partnership with IBM, and took credit for devising the twobutton mouse and his company’s very name, short for microprocessors and software.
Microsoft’s success earned him and Gates tens of billions of US dollars .
Business journalist Brent Schlender wrote in Fortune magazine three years later that the company’s cofounders had created ‘‘more wealth than any business partners in the history of capitalism’’.
Allen, who retained a sizable stake in Microsoft after leaving the company, was personally worth $US21.7 billion
($NZ32 billion), Forbes reported in March.
Both men insisted that they worked together on nearly every project in the company’s early years, to the point that it was all but impossible to distinguish authorship.
‘‘Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business,’’ Allen wrote in a 2011 memoir, Idea Man.
But as Microsoft took off in the 1980s and ’90s, Allen encountered mixed success as an investor, leading critics to question whether he was an ‘‘accidental zillionaire’’ whose wealth was ‘‘a lucky trick of time and place’’, as Wired magazine wrote in 1994.
Through Vulcan, an investment company he named for the Roman god of fire and creation, he pursued a vision he dubbed the ‘‘wired world’’, in which cable, satellite TV and the internet played increasingly central roles in popular culture and commerce. But while Allen was correct in anticipating an era in which newspapers were read on a screen, not in print, he struggled to reap the financial returns.
Despite the occasional downturn, his Microsoft stock holdings formed the bedrock of an investment portfolio that sometimes left him in shock, marvelling at his good fortune.
‘‘At some point, there is so much money, what do you do with it all?’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995, explaining that he had just invested half a billion dollars into the new Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG.
Allen was sometimes described as an overgrown teenager, whose billions had enabled him to invite Stevie Wonder to perform on his yacht, hold a masked ball in Venice, build a popmusic museum and acquire sports teams near his hometown of Seattle, like the Portland Trail Blazers, Seattle Seahawks and a share of the Seattle Sounders soccer team.
But he was also an early signer of the Giving Pledge, an initiative led by Gates and investor Warren Buffett to encourage wealthy individuals to donate the bulk of their fortunes to charity.
By Allen’s count, he gave more than $US2 billion ($NZ3.05 billion) to causes that included an effort to battle poaching in Africa with an armada of drones; research to cure ebola; and the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which completed a map of the human brain in an effort to understand the origins of consciousness and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
He died on Monday in Seattle (local time) from complications of nonHodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a family statement.
Allen had battled the disease in 2009, and announced earlier this month that it had returned. — Washington Post