The stratospheric jackpot that poured into the lap of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen transformed him into the kind of American hero that will take generations of historical consideration to bring back down to earth. Part of the zeitgeist that will have to be conjured is the culture of 1970s engineering that placed a technological revolution at the fingertips of some very young outliers. (This was not the first time, of course–the founders of the aviation industry were pretty odd kids. None of them ever achieved jillionaire status, however, partly because the federal government bought the seminal Wright patent during WWI.) The record of who wrote which lines of code during the first days of “home” computer operating systems is too convoluted to repeat here. Suffice it to say that the story of MS-DOS, the three-cherries program that released that mountain of dollars, was not a narrative of springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. That Allen and his co-Midas pursued a deal with International Business Machines is another cultural kink, IBM in those days having a corporate personality that channeled General Motors, God, and the Pentagon. The history of American technology and capitalism is a single thread. One fiber without the other will never explain the Paul Allen’s of our era and their mind-boggling fortunes.
