Famous Genealogies

Biography

Paul Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents Kenneth S. Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Faye G. Allen, on January 21, 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was almost three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers. They used Lakeside's Teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several time-sharing computer systems. After graduation, Allen attended Washington State University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Theta Fraternity but dropped out after two years in order to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, placing him near his old friend again. Allen later convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft.

Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975, and began marketing a BASIC programming language interpreter. Allen came up with the original name of "Micro-Soft," as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In 1980, after promising to deliver IBM a Disk Operating System (DOS) they had not yet developed for the Intel 8088-based IBM PC, Allen spearheaded a deal for Microsoft to purchase a Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) written by Tim Paterson who, at the time, was employed at Seattle Computer Products. As a result of this transaction, Microsoft was able to secure a contract to supply the DOS that would eventually run on IBM's PC line. This contract with IBM was the watershed in Microsoft history that led to Allen and Gates's fabulous wealth.

Source :  http://www.wikipedia.org/