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At age 21, Allen was a fellow software engineer when he launched the founding story of Microsoft by purchasing the January 1975 issue of Popular electronics in a newsstand at Harvard Square. The number had a cover story on Altair 8800 from MITS, a self-built microcomputer kit. Allen and his friend Bill Gates, then a student at Harvard, took the opportunity to write a version of the BASIC programming language for Altair, even though they did not have Altair to test it.
The success of Altair BASIC led the duo to create a company called "Micro-Soft" to write BASIC files for other computers. Over time, the company has created other programming languages, operating systems, word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail applications, accounting packages, server software, CD-ROM titles, Web browsers, and more. At first, Allen and Gates might not have intended to install a computer on every desk and in every home using Microsoft software –doorsStephen Manes and Paul Andrews say that their famous mantra was released later, but the vision over time proved to be much greater than that.
This is Paul Allen's 1974 resume, as he aspired to earn $ 15,000 a year, presented in his wonderful Living Computers Museum. pic.twitter.com/MjRaTv03au
– Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) October 15, 2018
Much of this expansion took place after Allen quit his full-time job at Microsoft in 1983, shortly after discovering that he was suffering from Hodgkin's disease – but also, he explained. in Idea manbecause his working relationship with Gates had become tense. With his sister Jody, he later founded Vulcan Inc. as a springboard for many activities.
In 2014, we felt that Allen and Gates had saved their hometown of Seattle when they had decided to move the young Microsoft from Albuquerque in 1979. After saving the city, Allen had an inordinate impact at Over the next four decades – not just like a technology entrepreneur, but also in roles such as real estate mogul, founder of museums devoted to pop culture and computer science, and musical impresario. I have never lived in Seattle, but every time I visited, my friends talked about Allen and his most recent activities uninvited. No tycoon in Silicon Valley has had so much local influence for so long.
Allen, who became a billionaire in 1990, has certainly been involved in many unsuccessful projects – the FlipStart PC, a tiny Windows-based PC, is close to my mind – but that's partly due to the volume of things that he did. It has funded companies in categories such as fusion energy as well as simpler areas such as social media; tried to turn a cable company into a next-generation communications giant; and pioneer of private spaceflight. He was an exceptionally generous philanthropist in areas ranging from ocean health to Ebola research. He is almost as famous for owning the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers as for co-founding Microsoft, but you could spend weeks finding interesting stories about his other activities. (Did you know that he financed the team that found an aircraft carrier lost during World War II?)
In the end, Allen took special risks, spent money because he found them personally interesting, and – he always seemed – to have a lot of fun along the way, regardless of the outcome final. He did not have a second act after Microsoft; he had dozens, and this relentless quest represents a considerable part of his legacy.
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