Paul Allen (was born January 21, 1953, Seattle, Washington, USA - October 15, 2018, Seattle) is an American entrepreneur, co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, which he founded with his school friend Bill Gates in 1975. Allen's net worth in 2018 was $20.3 billion. In January 1975, Paul published an article in Popular Electronics about the new Altair 8800 personal computer. After reading the article, Gates contacted Ed Roberts, president of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), developer of the new computer, and informed him that he and over the software of this computer (although in fact Gates and Allen do not require any relationship to the Altair 8800, but they emulated that processor). The president of MITS designed Paul in his office, and he demonstrated a working BASIC interpreter for his computer, and a few weeks later Paul and Bill were working at MITS. They thought of calling their company "Allen and Gates", but felt that it was more suitable for a law office, and then Paul suggested the name Micro-Soft - from microprocessors and software. In the credits of the BASIC interpreter they created for MITS, they also included the following line:
Micro-Soft BASIC: “Paul Allen wrote the supporting codes. Bill Gates wrote the executable codes. Monte Davidoff wrote a mathematical library."