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In In 1973, Paul Allen was a twenty-year-old technologist who, like many famous entrepreneurs, had been out of college to work as a programmer. On pizza plates one summer day in Vancouver, Washington State, he asked a fanciful question to his classmate and future business partner, Bill Gates: And if you could read the headlines of a computer terminal without the need to get your hands dirty on a copy of the newspaper of the day? "Come on, Paul!" Gates replied. "Renting a teletype costs seventy-five dollars a month and you can have a document delivered for fifteen cents. How do you compete with that? "
As Allen has related in his memoir, "Idea Man", as of 2011, his company's initial mission with Gates was, however simple it is, always radical: "A computer on every desk and in every House". The benefits of personal computing now seem self-evident. They were once almost unimaginable. At tony Lakeside School in Seattle, Allen and Gates had learned to code on a common terminal connected to a remote central computer, much larger than the modern refrigerator. In 1977 again, the president of Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the first giants of the computer era, had told members of the World Future Society that there was no reason for it. that anyone wants, without even needing to, use such a device at home.
If innovators like Allen did not fight to turn their amateur subculture into mass media, it's unlikely you'll read these words on a screen, let alone yours. "Paul foresaw that computers would change the world," Gates wrote earlier this week about his first partner, who died Monday at the age of sixty-five, from the consequences of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma . By the time his first fight against lymphatic cancer was binding for Allen in the 1980s, he had already helped set the industry standard for microprocessor languages, thus starting a technological revolution that was strengthening the reputation from the company – where I worked summers 2017 and 2018 – as the largest and most profitable software company of the twentieth century. Allen's technological expertise and his prescient leadership are partly responsible for many fundamental technological innovations such as point-to-point computing, word processing and the multi-button mouse, which Steve Jobs had formerly denounced as a difficult extravaganza at a professional meeting. that the visionaries had arranged in Palo Alto. ("You know, Paul, it's all about simplicity and complexity," said Jobs to Allen, who recounted the episode in "Idea Man." "And no one needs more than" A button. ")
Unlike billionaires millennia who deign to engage in non-technical activities, Allen attributed his entrepreneurial ambition and imagination to a vast self-will and a natural passion for art and literature. From his librarian father and his mother teacher, he inherited his love of reading: in his portrait of the main book, Allen's chin rests on a pile of books that includes "Dubliners," a university-level physics textbook, a history book. of the Mexican-American War and the Bible. Allen wrote, "I've read all the scientific books I could find, as well as related numbers from Popular mechanics It was inspired by Microsoft's inaugural software, an interpreter of the BASIC programming language, taken from the 1975 issue of Popular electronics, another of the journals that Allen has consumed in his youth. After reading an article about the Altair 8800, the most powerful minicomputer ever, he rushed into the Gates dormitory at Harvard to present the project that eventually forced his co-founder to give up. "This moment marked the end of my academic career and the beginning of our new business," wrote Gates this week. The Microsoft company was founded in Albuquerque, where the men were transferred to create software alongside Altair's makers. They quickly moved the company to their Washington state, hoping that Seattle's rainy days would keep employees from getting distracted. (They neglected to consider the sunny and resplendent summers of the city.)
After Allen stepped down from Microsoft in 1983, Seattle remained at the center of philanthropy in his life. In 2000, the president of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where Allen later founded a separate computer and engineering school, compared him to a modern Medici. Allen's intense investment in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, where Amazon's head office is located, has made the city an increasingly popular destination for young technologists. But his most cherished contributions to the city's stage and silhouette are perhaps the artistic and athletic monuments to which Allen devoted a significant portion of his wealth. He restored the modern glory of Bell Town's old cinema Cinerama and commissioned Frank Gehry to design a museum of pop culture that honors, among other legends, Allen's idol, Jimi Hendrix. He established a children's center at the Seattle Public Library, funded an off-campus studio for the beloved public radio station KEXP, and established a military history museum outside the city. He has also become a strong advocate for environmental protection, computational bioscience and space exploration, donating millions of dollars to regional non-profit organizations. Enthusiastic sports enthusiast, Allen used his fortune to acquire the Seattle Seahawks, a team that was planning to leave the city before intervening. "Sometimes I throw my net too wide," he wrote in his memoir to respond to critics his philanthropy lacked focus. "But my choice of companies was not arbitrary."
At the moment I When he arrived at Microsoft two summers ago, Allen was absent from the company's leadership for decades. But his energetic curiosity focused on corporate culture, which embraced rather than rejected interests other than those of technology, including mine, as a writer and programmer. (Last summer, the company made me an offer of employment.) I was alerted for the first time of Allen's death on Monday night by a stream of messages from former trainees who deplored the loss of our ancestor. In one of the many online forums devoted to his legacy, an anonymous engineer wrote: "If he had not provided the funding, I would not have had the technology of my high school that m & # 39; He had inspired me to follow the same career path as me. "The industry is known for its relentless, ruthless, mercenary and sometimes merciless desire." Allen, even as a technology champion, realized that his products were complements to pre-existing, rich and varied lives. "It's a fundamental part of my management philosophy," he writes in his memoir. "Find the best people and give them the opportunity to function, as long as they can accept my high intensity periodic kibitzing. "
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