The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Tributes: Friend Gates ‘heartbroken’ by loss
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with childhood friend Bill Gates before becoming a billionaire philanthropist, has died aged 65.
He died in Seattle from complications of nonHodgkin’s lymphoma, his company Vulcan Inc announced.
Mr Gates said he was heartbroken about the loss of one of his “oldest and dearest friends”.
“Personal computing would not have existed without him,” Mr Gates said in a statement.
“But Paul wasn’t content with starting one company. He channelled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, ‘If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it’,” Mr Gates wrote.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella called Mr Allen’s contributions to the company, community and industry “indispensable”.
“As co-founder of Microsoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world,” Mr Nadella wrote on Twitter.
Mr Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.
He and Mr Gates met while attending a private school in north Seattle.
The two friends would later drop out of university to pursue the future they envisioned: a world with a computer in every home.
Mr Gates so strongly believed it that he left Harvard University in his junior year to devote himself full-time to his and Mr Allen’s start-up, originally called Micro-Soft.
Microsoft’s big break came in 1980, when IBM decided to move into personal computers and asked Microsoft to provide the operating system.
Mr Gates and company did not invent the operating system. To meet IBM’s needs, they spent $50,000 to buy one known as QDOS from another programmer, Tim Paterson.
Eventually the product, refined by Microsoft – and renamed DOS, for Disk Operating System – became the core of IBM PCs and their clones, catapulting Microsoft into its dominant position in the PC industry.
By 1991, Microsoft’s operating systems were used by 93% of the world’s personal computers.
Microsoft was thrust on to the throne of technology and soon Mr Gates and Mr Allen became billionaires.
With his sister, Jody Allen, in 1986, he founded Vulcan, the investment firm that oversees his business and philanthropic efforts.
Mr Allen later joined the list of America’s wealthiest people who pledged to give away the bulk of their fortunes to charity.
In 2010, he publicly pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, saying he believed “those fortunate to achieve great wealth should put it to work for the good of humanity”.
“If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it”