Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, dies of cancer after 65 years

(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen persuaded his school friend Bill Gates to leave Harvard to create what would become the world's largest software company, who died on Monday at age 65, his family said. .

Allen left Microsoft in 1983, before the company became a big company, as a result of a conflict with Gates, but his share of partnership allowed him to spend the rest of his life and billions of dollars in yachts, art, rock music and sports teams. , research on the brain and real estate.

Allen has died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer, the Allen family said in a statement.

At the beginning of October, Allen had revealed that he was being treated for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, for which he had also been treated in 2009. He had already suffered from Hodgkin lymphoma, another cancer, in the early 1980s, before leaving Microsoft.

The music lover Allen had a list of renowned friends in the entertainment industry, including the U2 Bono singer, but he preferred to avoid the limelight in his Mercer Island precinct, as well. on the other side of Lake Washington and Seattle, where he grew up.

Allen has remained loyal to the Pacific Northwest, investing more than $ 1 billion in local philanthropic projects, developing Seattle's South Lake Union Technology Hub, which Amazon.com Inc has taken up residence in and building the headquarters. from his Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Gates described Allen as a result of Microsoft's partnership with a "second act" focused on building communities. In a statement, he said: "I am sorry for the death of one of my oldest and dearest friends".

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called it "calm and persistent" to change the world.

"It's underrated in Seattle," said David Brewster, founder of the local news website Crosscut.com and the Seattle Weekly newspaper. "He is distant and recluse. Howard Hughes has too much behavior in Seattle's behavior to really appreciate the good he does. "

Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle on January 21, 1953, son of a father librarian and a teacher mother. He was two years older than Gates, but when they met in the computer room of the very exclusive Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968, they discovered a common passion.

"At that time, we were just laughing, at least we thought," recalls Gates in his 1985 book The Road Ahead.

FROM BOSTON TO ALBUQUERQUE

Allen continued his studies at Washington State University, but dropped out of school in 1974 to work at Honeywell in Boston. There, he harassed Gates, who was studying at Harvard, so that he would leave school and join the nascent revolution of personal computing.

Gates eventually accepted and in 1975 both BASIC software jointly developed for the Altair 8800, a bulky desktop computer costing $ 400 in kit.

The couple moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the Altair manufacturer, and set up a company. Allen had the idea of ​​calling it Micro-Soft, an amalgam of microcomputers and software. The hyphen was later abandoned.

Allen was responsible for Microsoft's technical operations for the company's first eight years, making it one of the few software creators such as MS-DOS and Word that drove the PC revolution and propelled Microsoft to the top.

But in the early 80s, he had stopped being at the forefront of software development. He has never shown the commercial instinct of Gates, who is widely known to have contributed to Microsoft's rise to ubiquity in the 1990s.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after getting scrambled with Gates and his new lieutenant, Steve Ballmer, in December 1982, just months after the diagnosis of Hodgkin lymphoma. As he recalled in his 2011 memoir "Idea Man," he heard Gates and Ballmer secretly plotting to reduce his involvement.

"They deplored my recent lack of production and discussed how they could dilute my Microsoft stock by issuing options for themselves and for other shareholders," Allen said.

Gates and Ballmer then apologized, but Allen left Microsoft, although he remained on the board until 2000.

BATTLES AGAINST CANCER

Allen was cured of cancer after radiation therapy, but in 2009 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, another form of blood cancer. He went into remission in April 2010, but the disease resurfaced in 2018.

Allen kept his share of the company. His 28% stake in Microsoft's IPO in 1986 instantly turned him into a multimillionaire.

According to Forbes magazine, its wealth peaked at around $ 30 billion at the end of 1999, but Allen was hit by the sharp drop in Microsoft stocks after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and by some investment unprofitable in technology.

In October 2018, Forbes magazine estimated its wealth at $ 21.7 billion and claimed it was the 44th richest person in the world.

Allen, the owner of 42 US patents, liked to pose as a visionary of technology, behind Microsoft's rapid success and envisioning the future of connected computing well before the Internet.

"I hope that the personal computer will become the kind of things that people take with them, a companion who takes notes, counts, recalls, handles a thousand personal tasks," Allen wrote in a column of the magazine. Personal Computing. 1977, long before laptops became a reality.

The same year, he presented a first vision of what turned out to be the Internet at the Microcomputer Interface magazine.

"What I see is a home terminal connected to a centralized network by telephone lines, fiber optics or another communication system," he said. "With this system, you can perhaps put your car up for sale, look for a home in another city or view the price of asparagus at the nearest supermarket or consult the price of a stock."

Allen then called this radical idea the "wired world", which has globally materialized. He was not the only one to predict connected computing but was one of the most prominent.

However, Allen's technology after Microsoft, focused on areas he thought he would grow with the advent of the "wired world," did not achieve the same success. He lost $ 8 billion in the cable television sector, mainly because of a bad bet on the cable company Charter Communications, while the tech companies he's funded, such as Metricom , SkyPix and Interval Research, have been costly failures.

SPORTS TEAMS, YACHT AND HENDRIX

He was luckier in sports and real estate. Allen bought the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team in 1988 and became a local hero in 1997 when he bought the Seattle Seahawks football franchise after his former owner had attempted to move the car. team in California. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in February 2014 and both franchises are now valued at several times the price paid by Allen.

Allen has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the redevelopment of South Lake Union, a shabby neighborhood in downtown Seattle that has become a Mecca of technology, and the site of Amazon.com's head office. "Spheres" of glass.

All the while, Allen, never married, pursued a myriad of personal projects and hobbies. He owned one of the largest yachts in the world, Octopus, which hosted many lavish parties and served as a base for diving expeditions.

Passionate about rock'n'roll roll, Allen had a group at his disposal and spent more than $ 250 million for the construction of a museum dedicated to his hero, Jimi Hendrix, who turned into an exhibition of music and science -fiction designed by Frank Gehry.

He spent millions of dollars more for a collection of fighter jets from the time and funded the first non-governmental rocket to travel in space. He has also collected priceless antiques and works by Monet, Rodin and Rothko to build his vast collection of art.

Like Gates, Allen was a devoted philanthropist. He has donated more than $ 1.5 billion in his lifetime and is committed to donating more than half of his wealth to a charity.

Through various vehicles, Allen has focused his contributions on brain science, motivated by the loss of his mother, Alzheimer's disease, as well as universities and libraries.