Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, has died. He was 65. Allen’s company Vulcan said in a statement that he died Monday. Earlier this month Allen said the cancer he was treated for in 2009, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had returned. Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks. Allen and his high school friend Gates founded Microsoft in 1975. He served as the company’s executive vice-president of research and new product development until 1983, when he left for health reasons. He stayed as a major shareholder and member of the board. “I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen,” said Bill Gates in a statement on Monday. Despite being less well-known than Bill Gates, Allen played a critical role in developing the personal computer at a time when the typical computer was the size of a room and far too expensive for most people or businesses to own. It was Allen who came up with the name Microsoft and, according to his memoir Idea Man, it was he who came up with the idea to write a software program for the world’s first micro-computer. Paul Allen with Bill Gates in 1981. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock “During the founding first eight years my ideas were definitely key to the company. Bill would test my ideas. I would come to him with another 10 ideas that never went anywhere – he was the sanity check on the flow of ideas,” Allen told the Guardian in a 2011 interview. “When it came to selling and marketing and staffing and all those kinds of things, he was much more excited on the business side, so we became very complementary.” Microsoft’s big break came in 1980, when IBM decided to move into personal computers. IBM asked Microsoft to provide the operating system. The decision thrust Microsoft onto the throne of technology and the two Seattle natives became billionaires. Both later dedicated themselves to philanthropy. Paul Allen’s contributions to our company, our industry and to our community are indispensable Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO “Paul Allen’s contributions to our company, our industry and to our community are indispensable,” said Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. “As co-founder of Microsoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world.” Allen founded Vulcan in the mid-80s to invest in media and communications companies including DreamWorks Animation and the cable company Charter Communications. Several technology executives paid tribute to Allen on Twitter. “We lost a great technology pioneer today – thank you Paul Allen for your immense contributions to the world through your work and your philanthropy,” said Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, added: “Our industry has lost a pioneer and our world has lost a force for good. We send our deepest condolences to Paul’s friends, the Allen family and everyone at Microsoft.” Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, described Allen as a “great leader in tech and a man of all seasons who fully enjoyed his life and wealth yet also gave back to the world at scale”. Paul Allen, who owned the Seattle Seahawks, celebrates after their Super Bowl win in 2014. Photograph: USA Today Sports Over the course several decades, Allen gave more than $2bn to a wide range of interests, including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research. Allen invested heavily in his hometown of Seattle, helping to transform the South Lake Union neighbourhood into a thriving business district. In 2013, the billionaire released a rock album with his band the Underthinkers. Allen wrote or co-wrote all 13 songs and played guitar alongside his collaborators Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders, and Joe Walsh of the Eagles. This was Allen’s second album – in 2000 he released one with a different band, Grown Men. Allen was also owner of one of the world’s largest superyachts. The 126m-long Octopus, valued at $250m, has two helicopter pads, a swimming pool, a submarine, 13 guest cabins and a music recording studio. In 2015, he used it to find a second world war battleship off the coast of the Philippines. His keen interest in aviation led him to collect and restore more than 30 vintage planes, including Soviet and Nazi war planes, which are kept in hangars in a Seattle suburb. The Associated Press contributed reporting<doc-sep>They bonded over their passion for computer programming, then in its earliest days. In the late 1960s, the private school's faculty members banded together to get a computer terminal , machinery which at the time was rare and prohibitively expensive. At Lakeside, Gates and Allen learned how to dissect computer code together, Allen wrote in his memoir. Allen and Gates had been "partners in crime" since their days at Lakeside School in Seattle, according to the 2012 memoir Allen wrote, "Idea Man." The two met when Gates was just in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade. This week, Bill Gates mourned the passing of Paul Allen , his Microsoft co-founder and long-time friend. The two had been close since high school and if it weren't for a business the two founded as teens, Microsoft might never have existed. One summer during high school, Gates worked for a company that measured traffic flow patterns by counting the car wheels that rolled over pressure-sensitive rubber tubes. Every 15 minutes, a machine would punch a pattern of holes onto a piece of paper tape. This tape would be read manually and its results written down manually. "The process was monotonous, inefficient, and murder on the eyes," Allen wrote. Gates and Allen felt this process could be done more efficiently and more inexpensively, an idea that soon evolved into the friends' first-ever business: Traf-o-Data. At the time, Gates was nearly 17 and Allen was 19. Gates began hiring younger students at Lakeside to serve as human paper-tape readers who would then copy a tape's data onto computer cards. Gates paid each student fifty cents a tape, wrote Allen. Gates and Allen then used a computer at the University of Washington library (where Allen's father worked) to create "easy-to-read" data charts on hourly traffic flows. Eventually, a third partner joined the company and built a machine to automate the reading of the tapes. They'd later scrape together $360, or $2,300 in today's dollars, to buy a special-ordered 8008 microprocessor chip for what became the Traf-o-Data machine. "That's a lot of money for such a little thing," Bill reportedly said at the time. With Traf-o-Data, the boys made analyzing traffic data for the Washington state roads department much easier. Traf-O-Data later expanded, charging $2 per day for data collection to clients including small counties near Seattle and a district in British Columbia. Allen wrote, "In that first flush of entrepreneurship, we had grandiose dreams about the money coming our way." The company ran for years, continuing after the two had left high school, quit college and even after they'd founded Microsoft. However, just as the company's business began to pick up, Washington and other states started offering the same service for free. By that time, Allen said, he was preoccupied with running another company in Seattle with Gates — Microsoft. They reportedly netted nearly $20,000 for their work with Traf-o-Data, but the data-gathering project ultimately flopped. Allen said: "In hindsight, Traf-O-Data was a good idea with a flawed business model. We had done no market research. We hadn't foreseen how hard it would be to get municipalities to make capital expenditures, or that officials would be reluctant to buy machines from students." Despite Traf-O-Data's limited success, Allen has said it was essential in preparing them to make Microsoft's first product a few years later. While Traf-O-Data was a business failure, he wrote in 2017, it helped them understand microprocessors, knowledge that was "crucial to our future success." "If it hadn't been for our Traf-O-Data venture," said Allen, "and if it hadn't been for all that time spent on [University of Washington] computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened." This experience laid the groundwork for their success in technology, said Allen. "In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success — if you are willing to learn from it. Bill and I had to concede that our future wasn't in hardware or traffic tapes," wrote Allen. "We'd have to find something else." Paul Allen died of cancer yesterday at the age of 65. Gates said that he was "heartbroken" about the passing of one of his "oldest and dearest friends." "From our early days together at Lakeside School, through our partnership in the creation of Microsoft, to some of our joint philanthropic projects over the years, Paul was a true partner and dear friend," said Gates in a statement. Said Gates, "Personal computing would not have existed without him." Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube! Don't miss:<doc-sep>
UPDATE: Bill Gates penned extended thoughts about the passing of his friend and and fellow Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen on his blog. “When I think about Paul, I remember a passionate man who held his family and friends dear,” Gates wrote. “I also remember a brilliant technologist and philanthropist who wanted to accomplish great things, and did.” “Paul deserved more time in life. He would have made the most of it. I will miss him tremendously.” Original story below Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft together in 1975, cementing the pair as legends in the world of technology. Allen passed away Monday, and not long after Gates reflected on his time with his partner and friend in a statement: I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen. From our early days together at Lakeside School, through our partnership in the creation of Microsoft, to some of our joint philanthropic projects over the years, Paul was a true partner and dear friend. Personal computing would not have existed without him. But Paul wasn’t content with starting one company. He channeled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people’s lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, “If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.” That’s the kind of person he was. Paul loved life and those around him, and we all cherished him in return. He deserved much more time, but his contributions to the world of technology and philanthropy will live on for generations to come. I will miss him tremendously. Allen and Gates, both computer enthusiasts, met when they were students at Lakeside School in Seattle at ages 14 and 12. Allen, whose father was associate director of libraries at the University of Washington, spent a good amount of time with Gates and other friends in UW’s Computer Science Laboratory. So much so, that he received a letter in 1971 when he was a high school senior, informing him that he would no longer have access to the UW’s graduate computer lab. It was at UW where Allen and Gates launched their first venture, a startup that developed a computer system to count traffic called Traf-O-Data. Allen reflected on the venture last year during an event to christen the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free. As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success. And the emulator I wrote to program it gave us a huge head start over anyone else writing code at the time. If it hadn’t been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn’t been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened. Together, they founded Microsoft in 1975. The original idea behind the company, whose name Allen reportedly derived from a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, was to build an implementation of a programming language for a new microcomputer. Like any long-term friendship, Allen and Gates had their rocky moments. Allen’s 2011 memoir “Idea Man,” reportedly created a rift among the two titans, as the book brought to light previously unknown details about their relationships included tense negotiations over Microsoft equity and Allen’s departure from the company when he was originally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.