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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Paul Allen: A legend in IT Industry

Paul Allen, the taciturn computer programmer who founded the software behemoth Microsoft with Bill Gates when he was 22 and walked away eight years later with what would become one of the largest fortunes in the history of American capitalism, died Monday in Seattle. He was 65.
The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his investment company, Vulcan Inc. It was a disease that Allen battled in 2009 and which had recently returned.
Allen was an essential part of the launch and early success of Microsoft, which thrived on the combination of Allen’s creative programming genius and Gates’ hard-driving business acumen. Allen went on to become a major investor and philanthropist in his own right, something Gates noted in a statement issued Monday.
“Paul wasn’t content with starting one company. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world,” Gates said. “He was fond of saying, ‘If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.’ That’s the kind of person he was. I will miss him tremendously.”

Indeed, as early as 1977, Allen was telling Gates and other friends about his vision of a “wired world.” Writing in a trade magazine at the time, he predicted that the personal computer would become “the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.”
Allen left the company’s day-to-day operations in 1983, against the wishes of Gates, a year after beginning treatments for Hodgkin’s disease, another type of cancer that attacks the lymphatic system. The treatments were successful, but the illness had left him exhausted and also newly imbued with a sense of his own mortality and the need, as he put it, “to reevaluate your priorities.”
Microsoft stock went public in 1986, and by the end of the first trading day, Allen’s shares were worth $134 million. He kept a substantial investment in Microsoft stock throughout his life, and his net worth at the time of his death was $20.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which ranked him as the 21st wealthiest person in the world this year.


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