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the bulk of their fortunes to charity.

“Those fortunate to achieve great wealth should put it to work for the good of humanity,” he said.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called 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,” Nadella wrote on Twitter.

Allen and Gates met while attending a private school in north Seattle.

The two friends would later drop out of college to pursue the future they envisioned: a world with a computer in every home.

Gates so strongly believed it that he left Harvard University in his junior year to devote himself full time to his and Allen’s startup, originally called Micro-Soft. Allen spent Fueled by a similar vision, Seattle natives and friends Bill Gates, left, and Paul Allen both dropped out of college to create a company that became Microsoft.

two years at Washington State University before dropping out as well.

They founded the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and their first product was a computer language for the Altair hobby-kit personal computer, giving hobbyists a basic way to program and operate the machine.

After Gates and Allen found some success selling their programming language, MS-Basic, the Seattle natives moved their business in 1979

to Bellevue, Washington, not far from its eventual home in Redmond.

Microsoft’s big break came in 1980, when IBM Corp. decided to move into personal computers and asked Microsoft to provide the operating system.

Gates and company didn’t 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.

The first versions of two classic Microsoft products, Microsoft Word and the Windows operating system, were released in 1983. By 1991, Microsoft’s operating systems were used by 93 percent of the world’s personal computers.

The Windows operating system is now used on most of the world’s desktop computers, and Word is the cornerstone of the company’s prevalent Office products.

Gates and Allen became billionaires.

In his later years, Allen was at the forefront of transforming Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood from a row of parking lots and strip malls into one of the world’s biggest economic powerhouses. In the 1990s, Allen paid for 11.5 acres in the area in hopes of donating it for an urban park project called the Seattle Commons.

But voters turned it down twice, most recently in 1996, so he spent the next decade

gobbling up more land, totaling 60 acres, through his Vulcan development arm.

With Allen holding a rare, large swath of connected land in a major city, and Amazon looking to expand in an urban environment, they teamed on a building spree in the neighborhood. Vulcan built Amazon’s initial headquarters, announced in 2007, as well as many of its subsequent buildings, in what grew to become the biggest urban corporate campus in America.

Today, Vulcan Real Estate has developed more than 10.5 million square feet — the equivalent of about 15 skyscrapers — across 46 projects, recently including housing in South Seattle and offices in Bellevue. In addition to Amazon, Vulcan is building the Seattle offices for Google and Facebook and built the Allen Institute, all in South Lake Union.

Allen’s second research institute in Seattle, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), is focused on finding ways to apply machine learning technology to education and health care, in order to advance those fields.