Lymphomas are tough. == Interestingly his website has not gone to 'black armband' mode and continues to emphasize achievements.
Perfect SAT score (1600 at the time); 99.93 percentile. Unusual, perhaps, among pro sports team owners
I knew had had battled it before but didn't know it flared up again nor that he was near death. He tweeted about it on Oct 1st at Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) | Twitter. I watched a good interview with Paul Allen on 60 Minutes years ago. I'm not sure if this ~14 minute video is the whole thing or an excerpt: (published in 2011).
MSDOS lives on! Even Windows 10 is a simple Fisher Price interface poorly glued to MSDOS. I remember the days of the OS wars, when CPM threatened to be the leader, and then IBM gave the ENTIRE computer world to Gates and Allen by combining their dominate market share with poor, loosely applied deal making and apparently cornering the market on lack of vision. Paul Allen wasted a lot of money, but had lots to play with. Anyone remember Teledesic? How about Vulcan Energy? Remember losers Asymetrix, Starwave, Metricom? Experience Music Project (an ongoing loser), a dip into Charter and RNC (an $8 billion loss) long before Charter reorganized into its successful current self. And wasn't Allen the hip national bank for failed ClearWire or WiMax? I remember when I had a couple of Radio Shack Model 100s. Bill Gates' last coding project was MSBasic that lived on that little gem. After that he and Paul just counted money. And to let you know how hard it is to count money, the Gates foundation is housed in two opulent $500 million buildings in Seattle. Full of people. Counting, counting, counting ... Meanwhile, Paul's sister Jody probably has the majority of the Allen fortune.
The Allen radio telescope array is impressive. Allen family yacht is impressive in a different, inward-looking way. No doubt Mr. Allen made financial mistakes but for the moment I'd rather focus on the sunny side.
