Allen donates $14 million for high-tech facility at UW

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Before they gained fame and fortune beyond their imagination, Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the late 1960s were eager-eyed private-school kids who ventured to the University of Washington and tinkered with the computers on campus.

The two computer nerds who would later form Microsoft never attended the University of Washington, but thanks partly to those days, they are among the most generous contributors to the state's flagship university.

The UW announced yesterday that Allen has donated $14 million to a new computer-science and engineering facility that will be named after him.

University officials also revealed yesterday that the anonymous $6.5 million donation it received last summer for the facility came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Bill and I got a big part of our start in computer science at the University of Washington when we were still students at Lakeside School," Allen said in a statement.

The two would tinker with the four computers on campus, writing codes and creating a class-scheduling program for their Seattle private school.

"We want to help make sure it's an even more cutting-edge resource for the coming generation," Allen said.

At a time when the high-tech sector has been hit hard by a slumping economy, UW officials say they have been blessed to have the Microsoft co-founders on their side.

Along with the Allen and Gates donations, the UW received $7.2 million in August from Microsoft for the computer-science facility.

Former and current Microsoft employees individually have contributed a large share of the additional $16 million in private money the UW has received for the project.

Thus far, the UW has raised $67 million of the $72 million needed for the building through private donations and state funding.

The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering is scheduled to open in the summer of 2003 with 75,000 square feet of space and a lab that is triple the size of the existing lab.

"I am incredibly grateful to Paul, to Bill and to all our other donors for providing us with the tools to remain competitive," said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in computer science at the UW and former chairman of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (from 1993 to 2001).

"We've been operating with less than half the space of comparable programs at a time when the field is becoming more laboratory-intensive and student demand and intellectual opportunity are greater than ever."

Allen and Gates have given other gifts to the UW. Allen previously has donated $20 million to the UW through his various foundations — $10 million of it created the Allen Library, donated in the memory of his late father, Kenneth, who was an associate librarian there; and $5 million went to the Henry Art Gallery/Faye G. Allen Center for Visual Arts, named for his mother.

Gates personally has donated at least $60 million to UW, including $12 million for a law-school building that will be named after his father, William H. Gates.

An undergraduate-education building was named after his late mother, Mary Gates, in 1995 after he endowed a scholarship in her name.

Tan Vinh can be reached at 206-515-5656 or tvinh@seattletimes.com.