Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American entrepreneur whose fortune was founded when he formed Microsoft with Bill Gates. He regularly appears on lists of the richest people in the world; as of 2006 he is ranked by Forbes magazine as the sixth richest, worth an estimated $22 billion. He is the Chairman of Charter Communications, but is no longer a shareholder in Dreamworks Animation. He was recently invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
Allen also owns two professional sports teams: The Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association. He currently resides in Mercer Island, Washington, USA. Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle, Washington to parents Kenneth S. Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Faye G. Allen, in 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a prestigious private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was two years his junior but shared a common enthusiasm for computers. They used Lakeside's teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several timesharing computer systems. After graduation, Allen attended Washington State University, and was an active member in Phi Kappa Theta Fraternity, though he dropped out after two years to go and work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, which placed him near his old friend again. He later convinced Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft. Paul Allen was a model student in his years at Lakeside School With Bill Gates, he co-founded Microsoft (initially "Micro-Soft") in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975, and began selling a BASIC programming language interpreter. In 1980, Allen spearheaded a deal for Microsoft to buy an operating system called QDOS for $50,000. Due to IBM deadlines, Gates and Allen felt that they didn't have enough time to develop an operating system from scratch; they therefore purchased the fully functional QDOS and reworked the code to fit IBM's needs. Microsoft won a contract to supply the finished program for use as the operating system of IBM's new PC. This became a foundation of Microsoft's remarkable growth. Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease which was successfully treated by several months of radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant. In November 2000, Allen resigned from his position on the Microsoft board but was asked to consult as a senior strategy advisor to Microsoft executives. He put even more distance between himself and Microsoft at that time, selling 68 million shares of Microsoft. He still owned a reported 138 million shares. source: wikipedia.org GNU Free Documentation License |
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