We lost Paul Allen yesterday. Growing up in the northwest, his influence loomed over the region, but in a good way, not in the possibly bad way of some contemporaries.
Paul Allen existed at the intersection of all of my interests. This probably isn’t much of a feat, because his interests were so many — overlap is unavoidable. It’s impossible for me to visit any of my bookmarked sites today without seeing a tribute to Allen.
As an example of his influence, I just think back to our last family trip to Seattle:
- We attended a Seahawks game. Recall that in 1996, moving vans were quite literally packing up the team to move them to Los Angeles before Allen swooped in to keep them in Seattle.
- We walked through the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington
- We visited MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture, that Allen founded in 2000. Most of the exhibits are out of his own personal collection of pop culture artifacts. It’s a spectacular museum.
He was a presence in music and art, exploration, sports, technology, aerospace, science and science fiction. The list is endless.
What a tremendous life.