Dictionary of Computers - Allen, Paul Gardner

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US entrepreneur and computer programmer, who co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975. He later founded Vulcan Northwest to create a multimedia empire. In 2000, Allen sold Microsoft shares valued at more than $3 billion (15% of his total stake) and resigned from the Microsoft board, although he remained a senior strategy adviser. In 2002, Forbes magazine named him as the fourth richest man in the world, with a net worth of US$25.2 billion.

As of 2001 Allen held interests in a range of 140 media and Internet companies, including Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG, telecom service provider RCN, cable provider Charter Communications, and US presenter Oprah Winfrey's cable company Oxygen Media. He also joined English entrepreneur Richard Branson's consortium to win a British mobile Internet licence.

Allen owns the US professional football team Seattle Seahawks and professional basketball's Portland Trail Blazers. He operates six charitable foundations for education, medicine, and the arts. As a musician, he plays the guitar with his band (called Grown Men), and in June 2000 he spent $240 million in opening the Experience Music project in Seattle, a high-tech hands-on museum for rock and roll, in tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, and educated at Lakeside School. It was here that he met Gates, who shared his interest in computer development. In 1972, a year after Allen enrolled at Washington State University, Allen and Gates bought an Intel chip, built a computer, and developed their first software business, called Traf-O-Data. Allen left university in 1974 and took a job as a programmer at the aircraft electronics group Honeywell International in Massachusetts while Gates was at Harvard. In 1975 Allen bought a copy of the Popular Electronics magazine that featured the MITS Altair, a rudimentary personal computer kit. Allen and Gates then collaborated on the first version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair personal computer. That year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they founded Microsoft which licensed the BASIC language and MS-DOS operating system to IBM for use on personal computers in 1981.

In 1983 Allen, as executive vice-president, left Microsoft when diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease (which was eventually successfully treated), but remained a board member. He travelled for several years before starting up his holding company, Vulcan Northwest, to achieve his vision of a ‘wired world’, using the wealth acquired from his Microsoft shareholding.

Initially, his investment strategy was criticized by the US press and he was unfavourably compared to Gates. For instance, he was reported to have bought a 25% stake in the US information and Internet company America Online (AOL) in 1993, but then dumped the stock in 1994 for $100 million – a stake that would have been worth billions ten years later. However, the rapid expansion of the Internet in the 1990s contributed greatly to his success. Regarded by the media as a reclusive figure, he has also been named the ‘accidental zillionaire’.

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