Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen has died

[+Biscuits Brown MVC]

Breaking on CNBC news.

 

CNBC

[Xenon]

Oh wow. Thats sad. Cancer sucks.

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

That's unfortunate, he gave it a hard fight last time. RIP.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

He announced a couple of weeks ago that his non-Hodgkin's had returned, that he started treatment and his doctors were optimistic. 

 

Really shocked and sadden over this loss.   

 

...and 🤬cancer.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Nice write up from Bill Gates ...

Quote

Bill Gates: What I loved about Paul Allen

 

I met Paul Allen when I was in 7th grade, and it changed my life.

 

I looked up to him right away. He was two years ahead of me in school, really tall, and proved to be a genius with computers. (Later, he also had a very cool beard, the type I could never pull off myself.) We bonded over the teletype that some students’ mothers had bought for the school and had connected to a remote mainframe.

 

Eventually we were spending just about all our free time messing around with any machine we could get our hands on. At an age when other high school kids were sneaking out of the house to go partying, Paul and I would sneak out at night to go use the computers in a lab at the University of Washington. It sounds geeky, and it was, but it was also a formative experience, and I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do it without Paul. I know it would have been a lot less fun. (“Borrowing” computer time illicitly would become something of a theme for us. Later, when I was a student at Harvard, I got in trouble for letting Paul use the campus computer lab without permission.)

 

Even in high school, before most people knew what a personal computer was, Paul predicted that chips would get super-powerful and would eventually give rise to a whole new industry. Many people don’t know that Microsoft wasn’t the first project we did together. That was something we called the Traf-O-Data, a machine that would analyze the information gathered by traffic monitors on city streets. We thought it was a great demonstration of the power of these new devices. We got a prototype up and working, and we imagined ourselves selling it all over the country. But no one wanted to buy the machines, and we had to wind it all down.

 

/snip

 

Full op-ed at MSN