Paul Allen

Cofounder of Microsoft

• Born: January 21, 1953
• Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
• Died: October 15, 2018
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

Primary Company/Organization: Microsoft

Introduction

Known to the public as a cofounder of the software giant Microsoft, Paul Allen played an active role in the company until 1983, when his role ended for health reasons. After that time, he become a major player in a number of venues by investing in computer technologies, medical research, space and oceanic exploration, entertainment, and sports. Allen and his sister Jody founded the Paul G. Allen Family Fund to promote community projects in the Pacific Northwest. He also built the Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health at Washington State University. Allen owned the Seattle Seahawks football team and the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team and was part owner of the Seattle Sounders soccer team.

Early Life

Paul Gardner Allen was born on January 21, 1953, in Seattle, Washington, to Kenneth Allen and Edna Faye Gardener. He attended Lakeside School, a private boy's preparatory school in Seattle. When Allen was thirteen, a new student by the name of Bill Gates arrived at Lakeside, and the two became fast friends. Gates was a mathematical whiz kid, and Allen was fascinated with electronics. Both boys were addicted to books. Allen particularly enjoyed science fiction and books that explained how things worked, and he read the periodical Popular Mechanics with fervor. Because his father was an associate director at the University of Washington library, Allen was exposed to a wide variety of books. Unlike Gates, who has generally been described as “nerdy” at this age, Allen was considered “cool.” He sported a Fu Manchu mustache and aviator sunglasses and always carried a briefcase.

One year, Lakeside acquired a PDP-10 mainframe computer. Since computers were so new at the time, Lakeside teachers knew very little about it. Thus, Allen, Gates, and fellow students Richard Weiland and Kent Evans were left alone to learn how it worked. The four friends founded the Lakeside Programming Group and attempted to find ways to use computers to make money. Over time, the group did make money, but it also spent a good deal by using excessive computer time, for which the school and their parents were expected to pay. The boys eventually won free computer time in exchange for finding bugs in the system.

When Allen entered Washington State University in 1971 to study computer science, Gates still had two more years at Lakeside. The two friends continued to work on Traf-O-Data, a program they had created to assist cities in Washington with tracking traffic. Although they eventually made around $20,000 from the project, it became obsolete when the federal government began providing a similar service for free. Allen dropped out of Washington State in 1974. He moved to Boston and took a job with Honeywell, a technology innovator. Since Gates was also in Boston attending Harvard University, the two continued to work together on computer projects.

Life's Work

In February 1975, Allen and Gates began work on advancing the programming language BASIC (for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) for use in the Altair 8800 personal computer, owned by Albuquerque-based Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). BASIC had been developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two Dartmouth professors, in 1964. Gates stopped going to class, and Allen camped out in Harvard's computer room for eight weeks as they created Altair BASIC, a BASIC interpreter that was the forerunner of the later product line Microsoft BASIC. Allen concentrated on technical aspects while Gates wrote code.

When they finished Altair BASIC, Allen flew the program to New Mexico, writing an overlooked loading program on the way. At the time, MITS was near collapse and was putting all its hopes on the success of the Altair. The company offered Allen a job as software director, and he remained in Albuquerque. Gates soon joined him there. They formed a partnership on April 4, 1975, and agreed on the name Microsoft (originally hyphenated "Micro-Soft"), although the name would not be registered until November of the following year. In October 1975, MITS released versions of the interpreter for use in four-kilobyte and eight-kilobyte computers.

In July 1976, Microsoft released an improved version Microsoft BASIC and began selling it to companies such as General Electric and Citibank. Allen resigned from MITS in November 1976 to devote his full attention to Microsoft. Two months later, Gates dropped out of Harvard to do the same. Apple also licensed a version of Microsoft BASIC, known as Applesoft BASIC, for a flat fee of $21,000. However, due to the success of the Apple II line of computers, which debuted in 1977, this fee worked out to just two cents per computer. As a result, Microsoft would begin selling licenses on a per-use basis instead.

The Apple II also led Allen to conceive and help develop Microsoft's first hardware product. The Apple II was not compatible with the CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system, which was widely used in business at the time. CP/M, sold by the Digital Research software company, only functioned on Zilog Z80 microprocessors, while the Apple II used MOS Technology 6502 microprocessors. Microsoft's software was also designed to function on Z80 microprocessors, so Allen came up with the idea of supplying a portable Z80 that could plug into the Apple II and allow it to run CP/M as well as a number of Microsoft programs. The Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, released in April 1980, was immensely successful, becoming the company's largest single revenue source in its first year and selling more than one hundred thousand units by 1982.

Even more important for the fledgling company was a 1981 deal with International Business Machines (IBM) to provide an operating system for their microcomputer after Digital Research dragged its feet on selling C/PM to IBM. Gates licensed Tim Paterson's 86-DOS (short for “disk operating system”), polished it, and then licensed it to IBM as MS-DOS. IBM machines running MS-DOS became the computer of choice for most American businesses. IBM asked Microsoft to develop programs using FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal in addition to BASIC. By the age of thirty, Allen had become a billionaire.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. He would continue to serve as a consultant and as a member of the board of directors until 2000. His Microsoft shares continued to contribute to his growing wealth. In 1987, Forbes listed him as the eighty-seventh richest person in the world. Gates was ranked twenty-ninth.

After successful treatment, Allen made a name for himself quite apart from Gates and Microsoft in the worlds of business, research, and philanthropy. He founded Asymetrix Learning Systems in 1984. Steve Wood, who had worked closely with him at Microsoft, served as the new company's vice president. Asymetrix created development tools used by other companies, including Microsoft. The company went public in 1998 and became SumTotal Systems in 2004.

In 1986, Allen established Vulcan Ventures, a holding company that manages all his various projects. In 1992, he set up Internal Research, a think tank that drew some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley. The following year, Allen spent $243 million to purchase a controlling interest in Ticketmaster but later sold nearly half of his stock to the Home Shopping Network.

With the goal of helping to make the internet more accessible to the public, Allen began investing in companies that developed hardware and wireless communication technologies. In 1998, he purchased Marcus Cable and bought 90 percent of Charter Communications, which placed him seventh on the list of top cable companies in the United States. The following year, Allen expanded his cable interests by investing almost $2 billion in RCN Corporation. Also in 1999, he signed on to become a partner in a new enterprise being put together by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment and Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen of DreamWorks Studios to distribute short films over the internet. Although the project was never fully initiated, Allen continued to invest in various media enterprises, including Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen Media, which specializes in women's programming.

In 2000, Allen and his sister, Jo Lynn "Jody" Allen, launched the Experience Music Project, which became known as the EMP Museum before changing its name to the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016, a Seattle-based interactive rock-and-roll museum. Allen chaired the museum's Board of Trustees. From 1996 to 2000, he also took a more active role in the music world by playing rhythm guitar for the Seattle-based group Grown Men. In 2004, he realized a long-held dream by opening the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in the south wing of what was then the EMP Museum.

Personal Life

Allen continued to serve as a senior strategy adviser for Microsoft and, as of January 2014, retained possession of a reported one hundred million shares of the company's stock. With an estimated personal fortune of $20.3 billion as of October 2018, he remained one of the richest men in the world. He never married and pledged to leave most of his fortune to various charities.

The early years of the twenty-first century were a time of both illness and widening horizons for Allen. In 2003, he donated $100 million to establish the Allen Institute for Brain Science, devoted to studying and mapping the human brain. The following year, he became the sole investor in Burt Rutan's commercial spacecraft project. Their SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first private manned spaceflight. Allen was twice included in the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the one hundred most influential people, in 2007 and 2008. In 2009, Allen was diagnosed with another serious condition, this time non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but the disease went into remission with treatment. In 2010, the Allen Institute, which had previously published maps of the mouse brain and spinal cord, launched the Allen Human Brain Atlas. All of the institute's various atlases are available online.

Also in 2010, Allen again collaborated with Rutan to establish Stratolaunch Systems, a private spaceflight company focused on developing a new air-launch-to-orbit vehicle. The vehicle—a massive jet with a 385-feet wingspan, nicknamed the "Roc"—is intended to launch rockets into space from high altitudes. In December 2017, Stratolaunch announced that the first low-speed taxi test had been completed.

In 2011, Allen published his memoir, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. While he insists that his account of Microsoft's founding is neutral and was never meant as a criticism of Gates, with whom he has remained friends, the media treated the book as an attack on Allen's cofounder. Allen responded by noting that people describe events according to their own perspectives and suggested that he and Gates simply remember the same events differently.

In 2012, the Chronicle of Philanthropy named Allen “the most charitable living American” as a result of the $372.6 million he had contributed to various charities in 2011. Allen continued to fund numerous scientific and philanthropic ventures, including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, opened in 2013; the Allen Institute for Cell Science, established in 2014; and Global FinPrint, launched in July 2015, a global survey of sharks and rays that was expected to be the largest survey of its kind to date.

Allen owned three yachts, including the Octopus, one of the world's largest luxury yachts. Every year, he sailed the Octopus to the Cannes Film Festival, where he hosted lavish parties for celebrities. During the rest of the year, he often lent it out for research or rescue operations.

In the summer of 2017, a research team led by Allen succeeded where several other efforts had failed in finding the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis, which had been sunk by Japanese torpedoes in the Philippine Sea in 1945 in what is considered one of the United States' most deadly naval disasters. Using new data regarding where the attack had approximately occurred to further narrow down the search area, researchers used the advanced technology of a research vessel owned by Allen and a remotely operated vehicle to discover the wreckage.

Approximately two weeks after announcing that his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had returned, Allen died due to complications of the cancer in Seattle, Washington, on October 15, 2018, at the age of sixty-five.

Bibliography

Allen, Paul. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. Penguin, 2011.

Allen, Paul. “Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen in Conversation with Jason Kirby.” Interview by Jason Kirby. Maclean's, 9 May 2011, pp. 15–16.

Gillies, James, and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford UP, 2000.

Ichbiah, Daniel, and Susan L. Knepper. The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World's Most Successful Software Company. Prima, 1993.

Lohr, Steve. "Paul G. Allen, Microsoft’s Co-Founder, Is Dead at 65." The New York Times, 15 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/obituaries/paul-allen-dead.html. Accessed 2 Nov. 2018.

"Paul Allen." Forbes, 3 Oct. 2018, www.forbes.com/profile/paul-allen/#7633f4bc4417. Accessed 2 Nov. 2018.

Poeter, Damon. "Check Out Paul Allen's Giant Rocket-Toting Monster Plane." PCMag.com, 26 Feb. 2015, www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2477458,00.asp. Accessed 30 Sept. 2015.

Robison, Peter, and Brendan Coffey. "Seahawks Beat Microsoft as Investment for Billionaire Paul Allen." Seattle Times, 31 Jan. 2014, www.seattletimes.com/business/seahawks-beat-microsoft-as-investment-for-billionaire-paul-allen/. Accessed 30 Sept. 2015.

Wallace, James. Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace. Wiley, 1997.

Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. Wiley, 1992.

Wheelwright, Geof. “Bill Gates: Perfect Vision.” Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World. Edited by Wendy M. Grossman, Springer, 1997, pp. 31–36.