A key man in world of computers
Paul Allen Co-founder of Microsoft BORN JANUARY 21, 1953 - DIED OCTOBER 15, 2018, AGED 65
THE 1975 release of the microcomputer called Altair 8800 set off a chain of events which would end with Paul Allen and Bill Gates becoming two of the world’s richest men. Allen, a university dropout and Gates, who was at Harvard, were convinced there was a future for computers as commonplace household objects. They were right.
They realised that the Altair 8800, costing an affordable £305, would need software. “I thought, if we don’t do this, somebody else is going to,” Allen later said.
Within eight weeks the pair had a demo up and running of Micro Implementation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). Shortening this to Micro-Soft, the duo realised that each computer would need a slightly different version of their software.
They found themselves inundated with offers of work and, unbeknown to them at the time, had helped spark a microcomputer revolution. Their firm later became the largest PC software company in the world.
But Allen and Gates’s relationship grew rocky and while Micro-Soft’s success was sky high in 1981, their friendship had never been worse.
After years of conflict – and Allen seeing his shares in the company diminish compared to Gates’s – it was Allen’s illness that reunited the high school friends.
Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in a suburb of the city. His parents, Kenneth and Faye, were librarians at the University of Washington.
He attended the private Lakeside School, where he met Gates, two years his junior.
In the late 1960s the school acquired a teleprinter and the boys were engrossed with the machine.
In 1971 Allen enrolled at Washington State University, but two years later dropped out, getting a job as a computer programmer in Boston.
Four years later the pair set up Micro-Soft and by 1979 the company was known as Microsoft employing 12 people.
Within 18 months the pair became millionaires and in August 1981 IBM asked them to produce an operating system. They helped design IBM’s first microcomputer, which became a market leader.
The computer could only run using their operating system and this saw Microsoft’s worth quadruple to £12.2million almost overnight.
Despite their success Allen and Gates’s friendship deteriorated and they regularly had shouting matches in front of employees. Two years later aged 29 Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin disease and had months of radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant.
Although staying on the board, he chose to step away from Microsoft to spend time with family and travel.
By the late 1990s Allen’s fortune was estimated to be £22billion. He bought a super-yacht collection and a number of sports teams as well as giving billions to charity.
In 2009 it was announced that he was undergoing treatment for NonHodgkin lymphoma.
Allen, who never married, died from complications of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is survived by his sister Jody.