Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, philanthropist and owner of two professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, died on Monday in Seattle. He was 65.
With Bill Gates being such a prominent figure, you’d almost always forget about Paul Allen. Our condolences to his friends and family.
So are hundreds of other people everyday …
Not only did Allen give MicroSoft their name, but he was also instrumental in obtaining the contract from IBM to provide an OS to the then in-development PC. It’s entirely possibly that without Paul Allen, MS-DOS would never have existed, and Windows probably wouldn’t either.
The fact of the matter is, he’s probably had more impact on the world of technology in the 7 years at Microsoft than you will in your entire life. So yeh, it’s probably worth remembering him.
These people gonna go at some point, and although Linus himself told it multiple times that Linux can go without him it is hard to think about how much you have to learn to continue his work.
What a difference would be taking over kernel development at version of 1.x instead of 4.x. It needs not just the right mentality, technical skills but the will to pretty much sacrifice your life for development.
A lot of people building on existing software frameworks but the core of technology actually comes from just a very small group of dedicated individuals.
While much talk goes on about his Microsoft days, personally I will remember him for his efforts in finding shipwrecks which is a hobby of mine.. He has found a number of stunning finds including the USS Lexington, the Australian AE1 submarine, the USS Indianapolis and more. RIP.
I remember the news when they found the wreck of the Musashi.
Johann Chua,
He’s got a documentary about it:
https://www.paulallen.com/tour-of-the-musashi-wreckage/
It’s strange visiting his website and learning these things about him after he’s passed away. I would have liked working with him I think.
On the plane to meet with Altair about basic, they realized they forgot to write a bootstrap to load the program from the tape. He wrote it on the plane in machine language. Worked first time in demo…
Now thats insane..
As brilliant as Paul and Woz were, I always kind of wondered why they weren’t also the geniuses behind the second wave of success their companies had.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that their brilliance in the early micro pcs didn’t necessarily apply to later more powerful machines. You see the same with Bill Joy. Really brilliant people. But at the end, were not the drivers of their companies newer innovations.
…though later on Woz gave the world the Apple Desktop Bus (but I guess that simply fit with his low-level talents; the story goes that somebody gave him the idea when he was searching on what to work, he closed himself in his office for a few weeks, out came the ADB
)