This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/obituaries/paul-allen-dead.html
The article has changed 11 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Paul Allen, Microsoft’s Co-Founder, Is Dead at 65 | Paul Allen, Microsoft’s Co-Founder, Is Dead at 65 |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who helped usher in the personal computing revolution and then channeled his enormous fortune into transforming Seattle into a cultural destination, died on Monday in Seattle. He was 65. | |
| The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said in a statement. | The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said in a statement. |
| The disease recurred recently, after having been in remission for years. He left Microsoft in 1982, after the cancer first appeared. | |
| Mr. Allen was a force at the company during its first seven years, along with his co-founder, Bill Gates, as the personal computer was moving from a hobbyist curiosity to a mainstream technology, used by both businesses and consumers. | |
| When the company was founded in 1975, the machines were known as microcomputers, to contrast the desktop computers with the hulking room-size machines of the day. Mr. Allen came up with the name Micro-Soft, an apt one for a company that made software for small computers. The term personal computer would become commonplace later. | |
| The company’s first product was a much-compressed version of the Basic programming language, suitable for those underpowered machines. Yet the company’s big move came when it promised IBM that it would deliver the operating system software for that computer giant’s entry into the personal computer business. Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen committed to supplying the software in 1980. | |
| At the time, it was a promise without a product. But Mr. Allen was instrumental in putting together a deal to buy an early operating system from a programmer in Seattle. He and Mr. Gates tweaked and massaged the code, and it became the system that guided the operations of the IBM personal computer, which was introduced in 1981. | |
| That product, called Microsoft Disk Operating System, or MD-DOS, was a watershed for the company. Later would come Microsoft’s immensely popular Windows operating system, designed to be used with a computer mouse and onscreen icons — point-and-click computing rather than typed commands. | |
| Microsoft would also produce the Office productivity programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. | |
| A complete obituary will be published shortly. | A complete obituary will be published shortly. |