The other founder of Microsoft

Many of you know who Bill Gates is. Does anyone know who Paul Allen is? Well Allen was Bill Gates parter. This two men wrote programs for the Altair 880. They later used these programs to later develope Microsoft. He is estimated to have a personal wealth of 12.7 billion dollars. He owns three professional sports teams as well. What you don't know is that you could probably thank him for the actually making of Microsoft. After he dropped out of college he later convinced Gates to drop out of college and create Microsoft.

Allen was born in 1954, in Seattle, Washington. He and Gates met at Lakeside school when they were 14 and 12 years old respectively.

Allen arranged for Microsoft to buy an operating system Q-DOS for $50 thousand dollars. The company was already supplying software for emerging companies such as Apple and Comodore. Gates and Allen reinvented the Q-DOS as MS-DOS and installed it as the operating system for IBM PC, which dominated the market after its release. Allen became known in the company as the "idea man" while Gates became known as the "man of action".

In 1986 he set up a company called Vulcan Ventures in order to look for future investments. Through this he found a Silicon Valley think tank in 1992 called Interval Research. Through Vulcan Ventures and Interval Research, he began to put his long term dream of a wired world society in which virtually everyone is online in to practice.

He has made many investments. A few of his invesments include AOL, SureFind(an online classified ads service), Teluscan(an online financial service), Starware(an online content provider), hardware, software, and wireless communications. He ended up building an infrastructure of over 30 companies in pursuit of his "world wired" strategy.

Allen had other personal an philanthropic interests. He owns the NBA Seattle Seahawks, the NBA Seattle Trail Blazers, and is part owner of the MLS Seattle Founders which began playing in 2009. Allen co-founded with his sister the Experience Music Project. It is an interactive rock and roll museum that he had designed in Seattle. He also spent $20 million dollars to build the Science Fiction Experience. He also established foundations for the causes of medical research, visual and performing arts, community service, and forest preservations. He also invested in Oxygen Media, a highly-touted company co-founded by Oprah Winfrey and dedicated to producing cable and internet programming for women.

Allen also has a hobby of playing his own music. He is a Jimmi Hendrix enthusiast, so he plays rhythm guitar in a Seattle band called Grown Men which released their first CD in 2000.

Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982. He had to endure radiation and bone marrow therapy. The cancer was successfully treated, however, he did not return to Microsoft and started distancing himself from Microsoft. He was also diagnosed with a non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which is a type of blood cancer. As of October 2010 he was cancer free.