Nick Wingfield interviews Paul G. Allen in the New York Times:
“Looking at Microsoft’s sprawling product line and 118,000 or so employees, it’s easy to forget that the company started with one modest product made by two ambitious people.
“In early April, one of those two people, Paul Allen, offered a reminder of Microsoft’s humble origins when he posted a photograph on Twitter commemorating the company’s 40th anniversary. The picture showed the introductory lines of the printed code for Microsoft’s first software product, an interpreter for the Basic programming language that Mr. Allen created with Bill Gates in 1975 …
“Nearly two years ago, he founded a private research group in Seattle to pursue breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. [UW CSE professor] Oren Etzioni, the computer scientist and entrepreneur Mr. Allen recruited to run the group, said Mr. Allen was very engaged in the work of the 40-person group.
“‘At his core, he’s still very much an engineer,’ Dr. Etzioni said.”
Read more here.