Before Paul Allen partnered with Bill Gates to co-found Microsoft and launch the age of personal computers, he honed his craft here in Vancouver.
Allen’s ties to the Vancouver area spanned decades, from a teenage stint with Gates as a debugger at the Bonneville Power Administration to a donation for an art installation in 2005.
The philanthropist and computing giant died Monday in Seattle at the age of 65 due to complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, his family reported.
Teenage ‘hot shots’
In 1973, just two years before the duo founded Microsoft out of Gates’ storied garage, they worked elbow-to-elbow at the BPA Dittmer Control Center in Vancouver.
At the time, Allen was about to turn 20 years old. Gates was 17.
They were hired to work on the power company’s Real-time Operations Dispatch and Scheduling system, or RODS, one of the first computerized systems of its kind to monitor the Northwest’s power grid. It covered everything from automatic generation control to bill settlement.
Bonneville had commissioned another company, TRW, to build the system. Allen and Gates worked for TRW to help the company debug a program that would become RODS.
According to Allen’s memoir, “Idea Man,” Allen and Gates made $165 a week.
“Four dollars an hour was a pittance for an experienced programmer, even then, but Bill and I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Here was a chance to work together again on a PDP-10, and for pay!” Allen wrote. A PDP-10 was an early mainframe computer.
“Bill and I piled into his orange 1967 Mustang convertible and drove south to Vancouver, Washington, a land of strip malls, car washes, and a vintage A&W Root Beer drive-in stand where we’d become regulars.”
In a post on BPA’s Facebook page, a former network specialist at the company, Jack Leach, recalled his memories of Gates’ and Allen’s time at the power station.
“They (TRW) learned of two guys in the Seattle area who had developed a ‘hot shot’ reputation around the University of Washington computer center where they frequently hung out to get free computer time. TRW didn’t know that these guys were teenagers when they contacted them, but they gave them an interview, liked what they saw, and offered them a short-term job to come to Vancouver and work on the Dittmer project,” Leach wrote.
“As you can imagine, we (the ‘computer experts’ already working at Dittmer) were somewhat skeptical and amused by the arrival of these youngsters, but word quickly spread that they knew what they were doing.”
Allen and Gates started work on the RODS project in January 1973 and remained on the debugging team until the fall.
Allen’s memoir goes into detail about their time at Bonneville, working deep underground in a space he compares to the set of “Dr. Strangelove.”
“I was excited to see that we’d be sharing the space with dual PDP-10s; I’d never worked so close to a computer,” he recalled. “I spent countless hours checking my work, which needed to be fail-safe. For the first time, I was writing directly on a running operating system. I found it fascinating.”
After their stint at Bonneville, Allen returned to Washington State University, and Gates started his freshman year at Harvard University.
The RODS program, however, persevered — it came online a year later and remained the Bonneville operating system for 38 years. It was decommissioned and replaced by a new system in 2013.
Returning to Vancouver
That wasn’t the last that Allen would see of Vancouver.
In 1997, Allen — already a fixture in the greater Portland area after purchasing the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers — eyed the Clark County Fairgrounds as the site for a potential amphitheater.
Allen and his investor group were county commissioners’ top choice for the job. But they lost out to New York-based Q Prime after they refused to make an exclusive commitment to Clark County.
A year later, Allen kicked in $800,000 to build a YMCA swimming pool and recreation center in Orchards. Jody Patton, executive director of what was then called the Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundation, told The Columbian at the time: “We were impressed with the Clark County YMCA’s program of bringing youth, families and communities together.”
“That was a big dollar amount in 1998 and really got the campaign in high gear at that point,” recalled Mark Martel, who was the YMCA board chair at the time.
Before Allen’s gift, it wasn’t looking like the project would be possible, Martel said.
“When we started that campaign, there weren’t enough financial resources in Clark County to do what we wanted to do,” he said. “We needed someone like Paul Allen to come in and say we could do it.”
Previously, the YMCA met in a rented space on Fourth Plain Boulevard. Martel said that after Allen’s gift, others fell into place.
Wayne Clementson, the local YMCA director at the time, was out hunting in Eastern Washington when Martel called to tell him about Allen’s death. Clementson said in an interview with The Columbian that Allen is one of the major reasons Clark County has a YMCA.
The $8.2 million swimming pool and recreation center opened in the spring 2000. It helped fill a need after another pool closed.
There is a plaque dedicated to Allen in the facility’s gymnasium. The Clark County Family YMCA is part of a mixed-use development that includes commercial space and apartments owned by Vancouver Housing Authority.
Allen’s six charitable foundations were eventually consolidated into one, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. The foundation again got involved in Clark County in 2005, when the Confluence Project received $250,000 from it to go toward seven installations from renowned artist Maya Lin. Celebrating nature, Native heritage and the trek of Lewis and Clark, one of the Confluence Project’s pieces — the Vancouver Land Bridge — can be found just west of Fort Vancouver.
The foundation awarded another grant that year to help construct Innovative Services NW’s family services center near Vancouver Mall.
