Paul Allen

Childhood Of Celebrities : Paul Allen

Paul Allen attended Lakeside School in Seattle, where he was introduced to computing through the school’s timeshare computer. He was part of a small group who monopolized the Teletype room, where the computer terminal was located, and there met Bill Gates, who was two grades behind him. While other kids were writing BASIC versions of blackjack and Yahtzee, he was busy rewriting a BASIC compiler in assembly language.

Allen, Gates, and two other students, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans, formed the Lakeside Programming Group and made a number of business deals, at first trading their programming services for free computer access, but later actually getting paid. He and Gates also formed a company called Traf-O-Data to build and sell computerized machines to process highway traffic tapes.

After two years at Washington State University he dropped out to set up yet another business with Gates, who had just graduated from high school. Gates instead decided to go to Harvard, and Allen followed him east, where he got a job at Honeywell in Boston. It was there, in Cambridge, that he discovered the Altair computer on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. Over the next few weeks he and Gates wrote a version of the BASIC language for the Altair, the first product of their new company, Micro-Soft.

Technorati Tags: Childhood, Young, Celebrities, Famous, Businessman, Paul Allen

Share This