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Microsoft co-founder, former CEO and executive chairman Bill Gates should be just about wrapping up his last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft and moving on to head up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While I never met the man, he certainly loomed large in my life growing up in Seattle and beyond. While the classic "Tiger Beat" style photo here tried valiantly to make Gates appear a little sexy for the publicity machine surrounding the launch of the original Windows operating system, it failed where Gates succeeded. While Gates was a ruthlessly competitive capitalist who used and abused Microsoft's monopoly position to maim and sometimes kill the competition, he did make being a computer nerd something to aspire to, if not exactly cool.

My mother started working for Microsoft in the mid-eighties, when the company had only around 3,000 employees. While Gates had yet to become the world's richest man (a title he lost this year to Gates Foundation benefactor Warren Buffett), but he was already quite rich, quite young and not afraid to show it. For instance, there was his reported Porsche 959 — a car so expensive, it wasn't street legal because Porsche refused to crash test them. He parked it in a garage attached to his four-story underground home on waterfront property in Seattle's wealthiest suburb.

That home was across the lake from my family's, an absolutely gorgeous craftsman bungalow with views of Lake Washington which my parents purchased and painstakingly restored with money from stock options. "It split again" was repeated often enough right before a fine meal at that fabulous seafood restaurant on Elliot Bay. Even before Starbucks took the four-dollar coffee worldwide, Seattlites were indulging in their newfound wealth. A blue-collar city turned boomtown, with Microsoft stock minting millionaires faster than the Yukon Gold Rush.

Then a music explosion (fueled by both cheap housing and cheap heroin) touched off, and the coolest place in the world to be was Seattle. The coolest job for a young punk kid was as a barista. And the coolest classes at school had computers. Okay, we fought amongst each other over the Apple Macintoshes, but still. Microsoft was driving a wave of wealth and interest in Seattle the city had never really experienced, and I got to watch it as a wide-eyed kid with a knack for standardized tests.

It was when I went to art school in New York (where every computer was an Apple and connected to the Internet) that the allure began to diminish. Outside the bubble, I was just another weird kid who happened to be able to save your homework when a computer crashed — and let me tell you, that special skill got me very little nookie. Sure, Microsoft stock wealth was paying for a private education, but I was getting indoctrinated online by geeks who talked little about Gates when not cursing his name because of how hard it was to connect Windows to the early Web.

By the time of the browser wars and anti-trust suits, Bill Gates and Microsoft had officially become "The Man." The Microsoft monopoly was certainly something discussed in the family, with my mother making a token attempt to uphold the company line at home but my parents wary and skeptical of the organization's ethics. Eventually, my mother went off to create a startup and my dad started working for the first in a string of technology companies that had sprung up around Downtown Seattle.

When the bomb hit in 2001, it took much of my family's investments — largely Microsoft stock — with it. I was well out of school, but many lean years trying to pay Bay Area rents on HTML coder wages that plummeted by two-thirds seemingly overnight still lay ahead. I even had to resort to going back to using Windows PCs for a while, each blue screen of death fresh reason to drag Gates' name through the gutter.

Now he walks away with his monopoly billions, leaving the share price of Microsoft in the hands of Steve Ballmer, who comes off like a dumb ox when compared to Gates cold but graceful intellectual mien. He'll spend them on the poor, in Africa, he assures the world. We'll see. If he succeeds, maybe he'll restore my childish faith in him as a positive role model. As it stands, he's a shrewd and powerful but archetypically greedy bussinessman out to have a little expiatory fun. A heroic character, yes, but then as they taught me in the university Microsoft paid my way through, villians are the heroes of their own stories.