Industry Hall Of Fame Introduction

Paul Allen Programming Pioneer

Tim Berners-Lee Developer Of The World Wide Web

Dan Bricklin Creator Of The Electronic Spreadsheet

Vint Cerf The Father Of The Internet

Ross Cooley Compaq's Channel Champion

Larry Ellison Database Dynamo

Bronson Ingram King Of Global Distribution Empire

Charles Wang Software Mangement Mogul

John Warnock Wizard Of Type

Steve Wozniak Apple's Engineering Genius

Development Teams Introduction

The Compaq Portable

The Intel 386SX

Lotus 1-2-3

Microsoft Windows

Before he left Microsoft in 1983, Allen was head of research and new product development and was behind many of the company's highest-profile products, including MS-DOS, Word, Windows and the Microsoft Mouse. The Microsoft co-founder was making a fortune in Redmond, Wash., selling operating systems to nearly everyone with a PC when Hodgkin's disease caused him to re-evaluate his life. He left Microsoft to devote himself to other interests, and he eventually beat the serious illness.

Allen maintains a seat on Microsoft's board of directors and is still the company's second largest shareholder with an 8 percent stake.

"Before Bill Gates and I started Microsoft, we had a vision of a wired world in which everyone would have a PC at home and at work that would be interconnected in a global network, providing immediate availability to information and resources anywhere in the world," Allen writes on his extensive Web site (www.paulallen.com), where he describes everything from his investment strategy to his favorite books and music.

Like Gates, Allen is a college dropout, having left Washington State University to work for Honeywell. Also like Gates, he is near the top of the billionaire's club now worth an estimated $22 billion and is America's third richest man--behind investor Warren Buffet, who is second at $29 billion and Gates, who is No. 1 at $58 billion--according to the 1998 Forbes magazine poll. Allen has investments in some 65 diverse companies and owns two professional sports teams, the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association and the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League.

He also recently acquired Charter Communications for $4.5 billion and Marcus Cable for $2.8 billion. Combined, they are the seventh largest cable company in the United States. Another part of his original view of a wired world, Allen sees high bandwidth as key to delivering a new set of information and services to customers. "For Paul, it has always been the notion that the microprocessor connected to a network creates a new platform," said Bill Savoy, president of Vulcan Ventures, Allen's investment group.

Among other duties, Savoy oversees Allen's investments in new media companies and his 24 percent stake in Dreamworks SKG, which was behind the recent blockbuster film "Saving Private Ryan."

"Paul is keenly aware of the impact of technology and the way technology should be deployed and used," Savoy said. "He clearly is a visionary. There's no doubt about that. He sees opportunities in ways that other people just don't get it. As a person, he's just a really nice guy. He's not pretentious. He's not full of himself, just an ordinary, decent guy," Savoy said.

In business and in life, Allen surrounds himself with longtime friends and family. His mother, Faye, lives on part of his 40,000-square-foot waterfront home on Mercer Island. His sister, Jody Allen Patton, manages his foundations and serves in executive positions in at least two corporations. Bert Kolde, a former SeaFirst Corp. bank executive and Allen's roommate at WSU, headed Allen-owned Asymetrix Learning Systems Inc. for years before running Vulcan Northwest, the part of Allen's organization that monitors the performance of his companies and looks for ways to encourage synergies between them. Kolde met Allen in a fraternity in the early 1970s.

"He was really into rock music and played chess a lot," Kolde said. Allen went to work at Honeywell and hooked up with Kolde again at the beginning of his post-Microsoft phase. "He has always had a futures orientation. He always had walls of science-fiction books. He has been talking about the wired world for a long time," Kolde said.

In another forward-looking area, Allen is investing in online learning projects, including collaborating with the College Board to offer Advanced Placement classes online to high-school students where AP classes are not available.

Another project would help high-school dropouts earn Graduate Equivalent Degrees online.

Born in Seattle, Allen, 45, who is single, has blue eyes and a gentle demeanor, often has been described as shy, but friends and associates say he just does not seek the limelight.

But in the same breath, they will tell you he can handle the brightest spotlight when necessary. When Allen bought the Seattle Seahawks and his organization orchestrated a bond measure to build a new stadium, Allen stepped up to the plate, making television commercials and appearances and going before scores of reporters and television cameras during high-pressure press conferences. Voters passed the measure.

Allen has an artistic side, too, and loves music. His Web site lists his favorite music titles: Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix; Band Of Gypsies, Jimi Hendrix; Are You Experienced, Jimi Hendrix; So, Us, Peter Gabriel; Abbey Road, Beatles; Late For The Sky, Jackson Browne; Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd; and Vivid, Living Colour.

In fact, the billionaire has financed a shrine for legendary Seattle electric guitarist Jimi Hendrix, called the Experience Music Project.

Obviously, Allen pursues eclectic personal interests. He still gets together with his friends and jams with his band on a regular basis, as he did during a break at an Informix Corp. user conference in Seattle last summer. It is his passion, his friends say. Occasionally, he opens up the regulation-size basketball court in his home to employees.

His grown-up toys are too numerous to mention, but a few give the idea. He owns a villa in the south of France, a 122-acre property in Beverly Hills, a 387-acre island in Washington's San Juan Islands, a 198-foot state-of-the-art yacht and a 171,000-foot airplane hangar at Boeing Field that holds his Boeing 757 and Challenger 601 jets.

Even after having co-starred in the founding of one of the most successful corporations of the 20th century, his eye is fixed on the business models of the next century.

"He hasn't stopped pioneering," Kolde said. "He's still active in a lot of technology companies and his largest investments to date have been in cable systems, which he sees as an important platform for advanced digital services going forward in the future. He will play a significant role in bringing that to reality as well, so the pioneering isn't over."

Allen's idea of a wired world started at Microsoft.

"Paul Allen has long believed that the microprocessor is more than PCs running software," Savoy said. "When you provide a microprocessor with a communication network, you get the possibility of personalized information, which is an enormous change from today when information is mass produced. There is no reason that customized information can't arrive at your television set, your cellular phone and, ultimately, a new class of consumer products. Paul Allen believes this is leading the way to a dramatic change in the availability of art and literature and the way goods and services are delivered."