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Paul Allen has died at age 65:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/paul-allen-co-founder-microsoft-dies
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.
Of course the article has more information. There was more to Paul Allen that just mentioned above. Bound to hit multiple sources with different takes so be on the lookout for something from a source you like.
takyon: Allen Institute bio and Vulcan Inc. statement.
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(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday October 17 2018, @09:36AM
In city centres back in the 70's and 80's, big company offices sometimes had their mainframes at ground floor visible through floor-to-ceiling windows from outside. They wanted to show the world that they were modern. I don't think even then that computers were "as big as a room", but they were in their own rooms. What I recall is that most of the kit was in what looked like head-height standard 19" equipment racks, with some washing-machine sized cabinets that were disk drives or (double width) line printers. In fact the size of the equipment was not much different from big data server rooms today, only the total computing power is magnitudes greater now.
I used mainframes for engineering analysis in the 80's and never saw the computer. I coded by hand on data forms and posted them to the IT department where they got typed onto cards. A few days later I would be posted back a line print-out of the results (more usually an error report or even a memory dump an inch thick) and a box with the cards for keeping or re-use. We also started using micros (we had an HP 9825*) and mini-computers (we had a DEC PDP11).
About 1985, like most geeks then, I got a home computer, running CP/M. I never even heard of Microsoft or Gates until about 1990; it really annoys me when I hear people saying that Gates/Allen were responsible for the "computer revolution".
* I heard a story that seeing an HP 9825 was what prompted Steve Jobs to get into computing.