Allen, Paul

Paul Allen, in full Paul Gardner Allen, (born January 21, 1953, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died October 15, 2018, Seattle), American investor and philanthropist best known as the cofounder of Microsoft Corporation, a leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications.

Allen was raised in Seattle, where his father was employed as associate director of the University of Washington Libraries. He attended Lakeside School—an exclusive suburban private preparatory school—where he became friends with fellow student Bill Gates, with whom he shared a common interest in computers, and together they began honing their computer-programming skills.

Allen continued his education at Washington State University. However, he dropped out in 1974, after two years, opting to serve as a computer programmer for the American advanced-technology company Honeywell Inc. (later Honeywell International Inc.) near Boston, where Gates was attending Harvard University. Allen and Gates reunited and together developed software for the first microcomputers by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers.

In 1975 Allen and Gates secured a contract with the American electronics company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to adapt BASIC for use on the Altair computer. Allen thereafter moved to MITS’s headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he served as vice president and software director. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year, and in 1975 he and Allen formed Micro-Soft, the company that would become Microsoft Corporation. In 1976 Allen left MITS to work full-time for Microsoft, where he was influential in securing in 1980 a nonexclusive license for the DOS operating system and in brokering the following year rights to provide the software—renamed MS-DOS—for International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) personal computers, placing Microsoft at the forefront of the decade’s “PC boom” and thereby leading to its success. Allen served as Microsoft’s chief technologist until he resigned from the company in 1983 (after being diagnosed with Hodgkin disease), although he remained on the board of directors.

In 1986 Allen cofounded, with his sister Jo Lynn (“Jody”) Allen Patton, the personal holding company Vulcan Inc. to oversee his investments. He became the owner of the professional basketball team the Portland Trail Blazers (from 1988) and a cofounder, with Patton, of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (1990)—a private foundation devoted to strengthening and developing communities in the Pacific Northwest through its support of various nonprofit organizations. Allen began serving as guitarist for the Seattle group Grown Men (founded 1996). In 1997 he started the independent film production company Vulcan Productions and became the owner of the Seattle Seahawks professional gridiron football team.

At the turn of the century, Allen resigned from Microsoft’s board of directors (2000) and subsequently sold much of his stake in the company. He cofounded, with Patton, the Experience Music Project (EMP; 2000), an interactive music museum, and founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science (2003), a brain research 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 history as the first privately funded civilian venture into space. Allen became a co-owner of the Major League Soccer team the Seattle Sounders (from 2007).

In 2010 Allen sued nearly a dozen technology companies—including AOL, Apple Inc., eBay, Facebook, Google Inc., Netflix, Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and the Google subsidiary YouTube—for allegedly violating patents he had financed more than a decade prior. However, the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal court in 2014, and his appeal was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year.

Allen’s later notable projects included the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which he founded in 2013. He was also involved in deep-sea exploration, and he led expeditions that discovered the wrecks of various World War II vessels, notably the USS Indianapolis (2017) and the USS Lexington (2018). In 2011 Allen published the memoir Idea Man, which traced the rise of Microsoft and described his often contentious relationship with Gates.