MICROSOFT CO-FOUNDER DIES
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates before becoming a billionaire philanthropist who invested in conservation, space travel and professional sports, died Monday. He was 65. Earlier this month Allen announced that his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had returned. Allen owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks. Allen and Gates would later start Microsoft after dropping out of college. Its big break came in 1980, when IBM Corp. asked Microsoft to provide the operating system for personal computers. They spent US$50,000 to buy QDOS from another programmer. Microsoft’s refined product, DOS, for Disk Operating System, became the core of IBM PCs and their clones, catapulting it to the top of the PC industry. Allen later joined the list of America’s wealthiest people who pledged to give away the bulk of their fortunes to charity.