Paul Allen was castigated by Gates III and Ballmer and left the company as a result. His trajectory has been as an independent.
He has now cast his lot. I pray that he has protection, that the Trump Camp welcomes him and provides him a place at the table.
He was early on the hippie programmer who wore the ill-fitted suit, poorly arranged tie, and tennis shoes into the meeting with IBM that secured the contract for MS-DOS to operate IBM microcomputers. He had previous to that meeting found a third party non-commercial bare-bones operating system that he revised and adapted to become MS-DOS.
Gates III had lied to IBM that they had an operating system for the IBM microcomputers in order to get approval to set up a meeting to demonstrate it. Gates then hurriedly dispatched Allen to find or somehow come up with an operating system quickly for the IBM microcomputers which Allen found in the Cascadia region in Seattle. Allen found a computer nerd sales guy selling scrap computer equipment who had a home-grown bare-bones not-for-sale working OS for IBM microcomputers. Allen offered the nerd $50k which blew the nerd away and made him suspicious.
$50k was a lot of money in that day. Allen threatened to leave without a deal and the nerd hurried to get a floppy disk of the OS. Allen didn’t even check to see if it worked. He left with the floppy disk and went home to load it on his computer to customize it as MS-DOS. Not sure where he got the $50k but presumably he got it from Gates III who got it from his parents or parent’s rich friends as they were investing in a startup. Gates III mother was an executive at IBM.
Both Gates and Allen were Harvard dropouts. They were together at Harvard and left in pursuit of programming microcomputers. One of their first programming jobs was in 1975 tinkering with one of the first personal computer kits, the Altair 8800.
Their story became a fairytale on Wall St: “hippie nerds drop out of Harvard, go on to found Microsoft, become billionaires”. The fairytale became a template. The reprehensible Zuckerberg was molded in this template.
Without Allen, there would not have been a Microsoft. He was to Gates III as Wozniak was to Jobs at Apple.
Wow, that’s a pretty cheap seat at the table ($100,000) for a billionaire. You can’t even buy a new Ford Focus for a $100,000. You need to up your game there, hostage.
“Not sure where he got the $50k but presumably he got it from Gates III who got it from his parents or parent’s rich friends as they were investing in a startup. Gates III mother was an executive at IBM.”
Then the author of that statement has no idea about the history of Microsoft. They had the money, and lots of it by that time.
Allen never attended Harvard. Only Gates did. Allen attended Washington State University, which he dropped out of after two years.
They were together at Harvard and left in pursuit of programming microcomputers.
Gates never left Harvard till a year after they had signed a contract with MITS in Albuquerque to write Basic for the Altaire. Allen went to work at MITS in Albuquerque by himself till Gates finally left Harvard and joined him.
He was to Gates III as Wozniak was to Jobs at Apple.
Not quite. Gates was every bit as good a programmer as Allen, if not better. Steve Jobs was no programmer.
Not to be Sheldon from Big Bang, but I don’t know if Tim Paterson, who was the nerd Allen bought DOS from, had it written for IMB Microcomputers, which technically were not yet available.
I think he originally made DOS from CP/M, or at least a better disk manager than CP/M had at the time. I was using CP/M at the time on a Digital Research system, and vaguely remember a thing called 86-DOS, which Patterson had made.
I wonder what the hardware was that Allen initially used when he got home with the floppy?
Who is this “Gates III” you keep referring to?
Do you mean, Bill Gates? If so, why not just call him by the name everyone recognizes?