Bob Wallace, a pioneer in Seattle's early software community and Microsoft's ninth employee, died unexpectedly at his home Friday in San Rafael, Calif.
The son of an official in President Kennedy's administration came to Seattle in the 1970s to study computing at the University of Washington. He joined a circle of local enthusiasts who early on realized the potential of "microcomputers" that brought the power of computers to the masses, invented a popular early word processor and coined the term "shareware" for software distributed free with the idea that users would voluntarily pay if they liked the product.
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