Like him or love him, harass him or even hate him, no matter how you feel about William Henry Gates III, better known as Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, you cannot deny the impact that he has had on the world in which we live. From the release of MS-DOS to the release of Windows 3.0, the anti-trust lawsuits and struggle to embrace the world wide web to the recent battle with search engine giant Google and failed purchase of Yahoo!, the company that Bill built has arguably been the most important company to the modern world.

Don’t believe me? Consider what your life would be like without a computer, or at least a computer without a graphic user interface (GUI) based operating system, or even better, a computer without a graphic user interface based operating system that doesn’t have readily available access to the Internet.

For better or for worse, Gates has been the face of Microsoft, and through that engine, the driving force of innovation in the world of computers for over 20 years – longer than most people have been using the devices – and in less than a month, the former richest man in the world will completely step away from the dark side to focus his efforts entirely on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The ever-popular Wired Magazine, which Gates has graced the cover of 3 times, has released on article chronicling the events of Gates’ life up until March 2008, when Gates was usurped as the richest person in the world after 13 years at the top. He has come a long way from the pizza eating, hygienically challenged uber-geek he was to become the philanthropist he is today, and despite the fact the individual, through Microsoft, undoubtedly improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, I feel his best work – and probably a Nobel Peace prize – is yet to come.

I recommend you check out the article What We’ll Miss About Bill Gates – a Very Long Goodbye.