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Wire and staff reports SEATTLE (AP) — Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates and was a major benefactor of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, has died. He was 65. Allen’s company Vulcan Inc. said in a statement that he died Monday. Earlier this month, Allen said the cancer he was treated for in 2009, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had returned. He donated $3 million five years ago toward the remodel of the Allen Elizabethan Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, as well as gave $6 million to construction of OSF’s Thomas Theatre in 2000 through his Allen Foundation for the Arts. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also gave an unspecified “seven-figure” gift for the new theater through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Paul and his family have been coming to OSF for decades, and Paul’s love of and support for the Festival has been essential to the art and community we create here,” the festival said in a statement released minutes ago. “He had a particular, inspiring passion for making art and the classics relevant to young audiences. “Just last night we performed in the space that bears his family name – the Allen Elizabethan Theatre – for the final time this season,” according to the statement. “Our hearts go out to the Allen family.” Allen, who also was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks. He was also an early minority owner in Trilobyte, a Medford-based computer-game developer. Allen and Gates founded Microsoft Corp. in 1975. Microsoft’s big break came in 1980, when IBM Corp. decided to move into personal computers. IBM asked Microsoft to provide the operating system. The decision thrust Microsoft onto the throne of technology and the two Seattle-natives became billionaires. Both later dedicated themselves to philanthropy. Over the course several decades, Allen gave more than $2 billion to a wide range of interests, including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research.