James Edward Allchin (born 1951, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States) is an American computer scientist, philanthropist and guitarist.

[5] 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.

After receiving his degree, Allchin joined Texas Instruments, where he helped build a new operating system.

Allchin returned to his studies, earning the degree of MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1980.

[10] 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.

[6] Allchin is also known for debugging systems remotely by having the person on the phone toggle in hexadecimal via front panel switches of early computers to correct problems.

[11] Initially, Gates put Allchin in charge of revamping LAN Manager, using his networking expertise.

Allchin's first high-profile project at Microsoft was the Cairo technology, which was intended to add on to Windows NT to create the next version of the operating system.

[12] At the NT Developer Conference in July 1992, Allchin gave a presentation about the future Microsoft operating system.

One of the main goals for Cairo was the ability for users to locate files based on their content as opposed to their name.

[9] The Cairo and Windows NT groups were combined, and Allchin created a new client and server organization focused on business and IT users.

Allchin replaced Dave Cutler as the lead developer on Windows NT version 3.5 onwards.

With the release of Windows XP in 2001, both business and client versions of the operating system utilized the same code base.

[14][15][16][17] Allchin fostered an environment of transparency in the Windows division, with the company providing the public with regular updates on the development process.

He decided at that time to retire from Microsoft,[7] although Gates suggested that Allchin stay with the company for a while longer.

Microsoft also announced that Allchin would retire after Windows Vista shipped, leaving Kevin Johnson as the president.

In an email to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Allchin wrote: I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program.

[21]Running the most profitable product areas within Microsoft caused Allchin to be involved in many controversies and disputes along with his business and technical leadership responsibilities.

"[24] In August 1998, Allchin asked an engineer named Vinod Valloppillil to analyse the open source movement and the Linux operating system.

Overclocked, Q.E.D., and Decisions were featured on iTunes as New and Noteworthy and all reached in the top 10 on Internet Blues Radio.