Paul Allen, in full Paul Gardner Allen, (born January 21, 1953, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died October 15, 2018, Seattle), American investor and philanthropist finest often called the cofounder of Microsoft Corporation, a number one developer of personal-computer software program programs and functions.
Allen was raised in Seattle, the place his father was employed as affiliate director of the University of Washington Libraries. He attended Lakeside School—an unique suburban personal preparatory faculty—the place he turned buddies with fellow pupil Bill Gates, with whom he shared a typical curiosity in computer systems, and collectively they started honing their computer-programming expertise.
Allen continued his training at Washington State University. However, he dropped out in 1974, after two years, opting to function a pc programmer for the American advanced-technology firm Honeywell Inc. (later Honeywell International Inc.) close to Boston, the place Gates was attending Harvard University. Allen and Gates reunited and collectively developed software program for the primary microcomputers by adapting BASIC, a preferred programming language used on massive computer systems, to be used on microcomputers.
In 1975 Allen and Gates secured a contract with the American electronics firm Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to adapt BASIC to be used on the Altair laptop. Allen thereafter moved to MITS’s headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the place he served as vp and software program director. With the success of this challenge, Gates left Harvard throughout his junior yr, and in 1975 he and Allen shaped Micro-Soft, the corporate that might turn into Microsoft Corporation. In 1976 Allen left MITS to work full-time for Microsoft, the place he was influential in securing in 1980 a nonexclusive license for the DOS working system and in brokering the next yr rights to offer the software program—renamed MS-DOS—for International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) private computer systems, inserting Microsoft on the forefront of the last decade’s “PC boom” and thereby resulting in its success. Allen served as Microsoft’s chief technologist till he resigned from the corporate in 1983 (after being recognized with Hodgkin illness), though he remained on the board of administrators.
In 1986 Allen cofounded, along with his sister Jo Lynn (“Jody”) Allen Patton, the private holding firm Vulcan Inc. to supervise his investments. He turned the proprietor of the skilled basketball workforce the Portland Trail Blazers (from 1988) and a cofounder, with Patton, of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (1990)—a personal basis dedicated to strengthening and creating communities within the Pacific Northwest via its assist of varied nonprofit organizations. Allen started serving as guitarist for the Seattle group Grown Men (based 1996). In 1997 he began the impartial movie manufacturing firm Vulcan Productions and have become the proprietor of the Seattle Seahawks skilled gridiron soccer workforce.
At the flip of the century, Allen resigned from Microsoft’s board of administrators (2000) and subsequently offered a lot of his stake within the firm. He cofounded, with Patton, the Experience Music Project (EMP; 2000), an interactive music museum, and based the Allen Institute for Brain Science (2003), a mind analysis facility. (The EMP expanded its focus and was renamed the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016.) In 2004 he cofounded, with Patton, the Allen Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame and funded SpaceShipOne, which made historical past as the primary privately funded civilian enterprise into area. Allen turned a co-owner of the Major League Soccer workforce the Seattle Sounders (from 2007).
In 2010 Allen sued practically a dozen know-how firms—together with AOL, Apple Inc., eBay, Facebook, Google Inc., Netflix, Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and the Google subsidiary YouTube—for allegedly violating patents he had financed greater than a decade prior. However, the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal court docket in 2014, and his attraction was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court the next yr.
Allen’s later notable tasks included the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which he based in 2013. He was additionally concerned in deep-sea exploration, and he led expeditions that found the wrecks of varied World War II vessels, notably the USS Indianapolis (2017) and the USS Lexington (2018). In 2011 Allen printed the memoir Idea Man, which traced the rise of Microsoft and described his typically contentious relationship with Gates.