Badmovies.org Forum

Very sad.  Co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Portland Trailblazers and the Seattle Seahawks, founder of the Vulcan company and multi-billionaire Paul Allen, has died at 65 after a long battle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.  He was a brilliant, multi-talented man and a fixture in the Pacific Northwest.  Rest in peace Paul, you will be missed.  :bluesad:

I saw that. Paul Allen dead. Sigh. One less prophet of the early information Age. I told my father, a dedicated Apple fan sorry for his loss, and he actually said thank you. Somehow some deaths feel personal like that.

When I was growing up computers were the future, they were an almost magical concept, even  a magical word. The Mac SE of 1987? A thrilling building block to greater things that would change the very world to a better place. Computers were the gateway to the stars, the symbol of the sci-fi tomorrow we were going to achieve. They were mysterious thinking entities few understood no matter how much they dazzled our imaginations.

Now I see that computers fell well short of our lofty hopes, being a doorway more for cat videos and social networking than the brains of rocket ships, yet there is still something in me that flinches at the passing of someone like Paul Allen, because people like him were to be the shepherds who took us forward, yet increasingly they're slipping away and becoming part of an optimistic past.

Some little part of me is still shocked that the glorious computerized future that was expected was mostly high hopes and illusion almost to the point of smoke and mirrors. "Almost" because I know Allen and his kind believed in the dream as much as we did.

Maybe the next generation will take us forward. May the dream live on.