Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, dies at 65
Paul Allen, the taciturn computer programmer who founded the software behemoth Microsoft with Bill Gates when he was 22 and walked away eight years later with what would become one of the largest fortunes in the history of American capitalism, died Monday in Seattle. He was 65.
The cause was complications of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his investment company, Vulcan Inc.
Although once dubbed the “accidental zillionaire” by Wired magazine, Allen was in fact an essential part of the launch and early success of Microsoft, which thrived on the combination of Allen’s creative programming genius and Gates’ hard-driving business acumen.
“I guess you would call me the doer and Paul the idea man,” Gates said in 1981. “I’m more aggressive and crazily competitive, the front man running the Bill Gates and Paul Allen relocated Microsoft to Bellevue, Wash., in 1979.
business day to day, while Paul keeps us out front in research and development.”
As early as 1977, Allen was telling Gates and other friends about his vision of a “wired world.” Writing in a trade magazine at the time, he predicted that the personal computer would become “the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.”
Allen left the company’s day-to-day operations in
1983, against the wishes of his friend Gates, a year after beginning treatments for Hodgkins disease. The treatments were successful, but the illness had left him exhausted and also newly imbued with a sense of his own mortality and the need, as he put it, “to re-evaluate your priorities.”
He battled non-hodgkins lymphoma in 2009. On Oct. 1, he tweeted that the disease had returned, and that he was being treated and his doctors were optimistic. He died Monday afternoon, Vulcan said.