RIP: Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Was The Idea Man of Mircrosoft

vimukthi (72)in #dlike • 6 years ago

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 world of computers was forever changed and shaped by the work of this individual and he left us on October 15, 2018

Allen was 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. Allen went on to become a major investor and philanthropist in his own right, something Gates noted in a statement issued Monday.
“Paul wasn’t content with starting one company. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world,” Gates said. “He was fond of saying, ‘If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.’ That’s the kind of person he was. I will miss him tremendously.”

After leaving Microsoft, Allen decided he wanted to donate to worthwhile causes and to invest in “other people to do exciting, new, creative things,” as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. He devoted the rest of his life to spending and putting that vast fortune to work — on an eclectic mix of philanthropic causes and myriad investments that included professional sports teams, space travel and technology.

Over the course of his life, Allen donated more than $2 billion to libraries, museums, AIDS research and even the search for extraterrestrial life, and was an early signatory to the Giving Pledge, committing to contribute a majority of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Much of his philanthropic work was funneled through the Allen Institute, which focused on funding research into brain science, cell science and artificial intelligence.

Gates went to Harvard; Allen dropped out of college and followed him to the Boston area, taking a programming job at Honeywell. On a cold December day in 1974, Allen was on his way to see Gates when he saw a Popular Electronics cover featuring the Altair, a build-it-yourself personal computer kit being sold by two inventors in Albuquerque.
As they later told the story, Allen ran to Gates’ dorm room and persuaded him to help write a version of the programming language Basic for the Altair’s Intel chip, something some experts at the time said couldn’t be done. In a two-month marathon, they did it. On a flight to Albuquerque, where he hoped to sell the program to the Altair’s manufacturer, MITS, Allen realized that a key part of the code was missing. So he wrote it out on scraps of paper on the plane.
It was 1975 and the beginning of Microsoft. Allen went to work for MITS, and Gates stayed at Harvard, both running Microsoft as a part-time venture. By early 1977, the company had developed enough business that Gates dropped out of school and Allen quit MITS to work full time at Microsoft.