Early Life and Career
Paul Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents Kenneth Samuel Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Edna Faye (née Gardner) Allen, on January 21, 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was almost three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers. They used Lakeside's Teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several time-sharing computer systems. After graduation, Allen attended Washington State University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Theta Fraternity but dropped out after two years in order to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, placing him near his old friend again. Allen later convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft.
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