Jim Allchin

James Edward Allchin (born 1951, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States) is an American computer scientist, philanthropist and guitarist best known for being a former Microsoft executive.

He assisted Microsoft in creating many of the system platform components including Microsoft Windows, Windows Server, server products such as SQL Server, and developer technologies. He built Microsoft's server business and lead foundational releases of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. He is also known for his leading role in the architecture and development of the directory services technology Banyan VINES.

He has won numerous awards in his career such as the Technical Excellence Person of the Year in 2001. Jim Allchin led the Platforms division at Microsoft, overseeing the development of Windows client from Windows 98 to Windows Vista, Windows Server from NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2008, as well as several releases of Microsoft server products as well as Windows CE and Windows Embedded line of products. After serving sixteen years at Microsoft, Allchin retired in early 2007 when Microsoft officially released the Windows Vista operating system to consumers. He is now a professional musician.

Allchin was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1951. His father originally worked as a warehouse worker. While he was still an infant, the Allchin family moved to Keysville, Florida, where his parents worked on a citrus farm. Allchin grew up in a tin-roof house built by his father. When he and his brother Keith were children, they earned by hoeing weeds on the farm's orange orchard. As a child, he spent some of his free time learning music. Allchin first began playing the trumpet but later switched to the guitar. He had an aptitude for science and engineering, and would repair go-karts and tractors around the farm. Neither of his parents attended college, but his father had a natural talent for math and would perform business calculations off the top of his head.

While in high school, he got a job as an intern at a payroll-processing company in Winter Haven, Florida. While there, he wrote his first computer program, which determined the day of the week based on the date input. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida, but dropped out to play in a number of bands, including Rain, Tudor Rose, and Red, White and Blue. They played various clubs and roadhouses in the South, before he decided that he did not enjoy life on the road. He later returned to the university and graduated with BS in Computer Science in 1973.

After receiving his degree, Allchin joined Texas Instruments, where he helped build a new operating system. Afterwards, he followed a former lecturer, Dick Kiger, to Wyoming, where he helped him to start a new company offering computer services nationwide, before moving on to start another company with Kiger in Dallas, Texas.

Allchin returned to his studies, earning the degree of MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1980. Allchin wrote a language-independent, portable file system while at Stanford. While pursuing his PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology in the early eighties, he was the primary architect of the Clouds distributed object-oriented operating system; his PhD thesis was entitled "An Architecture for Reliable Decentralized Systems".

In 1983, Allchin was recruited to Banyan by founder Dave Mahoney, eventually being Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. During his seven years at Banyan, he created the VINES distributed operating system, which included the StreetTalk directory protocol as well as a series of network services based on the Xerox XNS stack.