paul allen

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Achievement

Founded Microsoft together with Bill Gates

Biography

Attends World's Fair at Seattle Center; 33 years later announces location as home to the Experience Music Project; Paul with sister Jody.


Meets Bill Gates, then an eighth-grader; they and a small group of other Lakeside students begin programming in BASIC, using a teletype terminal.

Helps teach computer course to junior high students at Lakeside.

Graduates from Lakeside; enrolls at Washington State University.

Allen and Gates buy an Intel 8008 chip for $360 and build a computer to measure traffic.They launch their first company, Traf-O-Data.

Hired as a programmer by Honeywell in Boston.

Allen and Gates write the first microcomputer BASIC for the Altair, a computer kit based on Intel's new 8080 chip. They move to Albuquerque, N.M., where Altair's producer MITS makes Allen its associate director of software. Allen divides his time between MITS and a new company he and Gates have started to develop and market microcomputer languages: Micro Soft.

Apple commissions Microsoft to supply a version of its BASIC for the hot-selling Apple II. Radio Shack buys a Microsoft BASIC for its TRS-80.

Microsoft moves from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Wash.
Microsoft agrees to develop and license DOS and BASIC to IBM for its new personal computer.

Gates and Allen discuss graphical user interfaces, planting the seeds that will become Windows.

Allen develops Hodgkin's disease; leaves Microsoft in 1983.

Starts Asymetrix to make application development tools that nonprogrammers can use.

Awarded Life-Time Achievement Award by PC Magazine.

Inducted into the Computer Museum Hall of Fame.

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Honors and awards