Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, has died in Seattle at the age of 65.
Mr Allen's company Vulcan Inc issued a statement saying he died on Monday (local time).
The Microsoft co-founder was treated for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009, and earlier this month he said the cancer had returned.
Who was Paul Allen?
- Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975
- He was estimated to be worth $21.8 billion
- He pledged to give away the majority of his fortune, and had donated $2 billion to various causes
- He was heavily invested in technology, science, conservation and exploration
- It was his research vessel that discovered the wreckage of USS Indianapolis — an American ship that sank in WWII when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine — in 2017
- He was also heavily invested in sport — he owned the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers, the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, and had a stake in the Seattle Sounders soccer team
Mr Allen, an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.
Mr Allen and Mr Gates founded Microsoft Corp in 1975.
Microsoft's big break came in 1980, when IBM Corp decided to move into personal computers and asked Microsoft to provide the operating system — a decision that would make the two Seattle natives billionaires.
They did not invent the operating system; to meet IBM's needs, they spent $US50,000 to buy one known as QDOS from another programmer, Tim Paterson.
Eventually the product refined by Microsoft — and renamed DOS, for Disk Operating System — became the core of IBM PCs and their clones, catapulting Microsoft into its dominant position in the PC industry.
The first versions of two classic Microsoft products, Microsoft Word and the Windows operating system, were released in 1983.
By 1991, Microsoft's operating systems were used by 93 per cent of the world's personal computers.
Visionary and philanthropist
Over the course of several decades, Mr Allen gave more than $US2 billion to a wide range of interests, including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research.
Mr Allen, the owner of 42 US patents, liked to cast himself as a technology visionary who drove Microsoft's early success and saw the future of connected computing long before the internet.
"I expect the personal computer to become the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks," he wrote in a column in Personal Computing magazine as far back as 1977, long before portable computers became a reality.
In the same year, he outlined an early vision of what turned out to be the internet to Microcomputer Interface magazine.
"What I do see is a home terminal that's connected to a centralised network by phone lines, fibre optics or some other communication system," he said.
"With that system you can perhaps put your car up for sale or look for a house in a different city or check out the price of asparagus at the nearest grocery market or check the price of a stock."
Mr Allen later called this sweeping idea the "wired world," which has broadly come to fruition. He was not alone in predicting connected computing, but was one of the most prominent.
Yet his technology ventures after Microsoft, which focused on areas he thought would grow with the advent of the "wired world," were not as successful.
He lost $US8 billion in the cable television industry, chiefly with a bad bet on cable company Charter Communications, while technology ventures he bankrolled such as Metricom, SkyPix and Interval Research were costly failures.
AP/Reuters
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