Having earned his entrepreneurial billions from nothing but a gift for computer programming, the Harvard dropout should represent the true American capitalist hero.

But the Justice Department, in its most ambitious anti-trust case in a decade, this week cast Mr Gates as a paranoid megalomaniac driven to crush all forms of competition in his quest for world dominance.

It is a case which is likely to run for weeks and whose outcome may determine who will hold the aces in the future information age.

Has Microsoft, as the Government contends, exploited its world dominance in operating systems to bully and coerce potential rivals into either working with it or risking being rolled over? Or is it a case of Washington bureaucrats conspiring, as Microsoft lawyer John Warden told the court this week, to stifle the country's finest innovators? 'This is not really an anti-trust case but the return of the Luddites, who went around smashing machines with sledgehammers to stop the march of science and technology,' Mr Warden said.

The court has so far heard the testimony of James Barksdale, the chief executive officer of rival Internet browser maker Netscape, who alleged that after his firm rebuffed an approach from Mr Gates in 1995 for the two companies to carve up the browser market together, Microsoft embarked on a scheme to bully leading Internet and software companies into dropping co-operation with Netscape's product.

But in seeking to prove that Microsoft muscle stretched far beyond the Netscape case, the Justice Department will also be calling witnesses from other firms who claim to have been bruised by the software giant - including Apple, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

Lurking beyond the court action is the shadowy figure of Mr Gates - a maverick genius who, despite his brush with Washington, remains a hero to the US public.

Polls have shown that between 70 and 80 per cent of Americans have a favourable impression of Mr Gates and Microsoft, about 50 per cent believe he is playing fair in the market and 70 per cent think he deserves every billion he has made.

The Government's image of Mr Gates as part-Rockefeller, part-Stalin does not appear to fit the picture of the boyish computer nerd, whose 20-hectare Microsoft campus outside Seattle is a hi-tech mini-city populated by twentysomething employees wandering around in jeans, T-shirts and sandals.

Mr Gates, who is revered by his talented staff but who insists on being called by his first name, inspires intense loyalty - not surprising when, by all estimates, the company has created three billionaires (Mr Gates and his two initial investors) and about 5,000 millionaires.

Far from trying to control the world, its executives insist, they spend most of their time fretting they will be unable to keep up the innovative edge which ensures their products sell.

'Will we be replaced tomorrow? No. In a very short time frame, Microsoft is an incredibly strong company,' Mr Gates said recently.

'But when you look to the two-to-three-year frame, I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that any technology company has a guaranteed position.'