Paul Allen
Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, left it at thirty-two after a cancer diagnosis, and spent four decades giving the money away. Born in Seattle in 1953, the son of a university librarian, he met Bill Gates at the private Lakeside School, where the two spent their teens in the computer room and were once banned for exploiting bugs to obtain free machine time. They wrote a traffic-counting programme together and worked briefly at Honeywell. In January 1975 Allen saw the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics, bought a copy, and told Gates that the moment had arrived. They telephoned the manufacturer claiming to have a BASIC interpreter for it, which they did not, and wrote one in eight weeks on a simulator without ever seeing the machine. Allen flew to Albuquerque and debugged the loader on the plane; it worked first time. He proposed the name Micro-Soft. The decisive commercial act came in 1980, when IBM needed an operating system. Microsoft bought QDOS from a Seattle company for $50,000, adapted it as MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM non-exclusively — which meant every clone maker had to buy it too. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982 and left the following year, keeping his shares. He funded SpaceShipOne, the first privately built craft to reach space, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Telescope Array, and search expeditions that found several sunken warships. He owned the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, signed the Giving Pledge, and died of lymphoma in 2018.
- Lived: 1953 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, programmer, philanthropist
