IS BILL GATES THE DEVIL INCARNATE?

The Microsoft Corp. chairman has been accused of many ungentlemanly things by rivals and former partners. Now, just in time for Halloween, a cyber-maven on the Juno Corp. ad-supported E-mail service suggests he may also have a set of horns. Since the software pioneer is actually the third in his family's line of Bill Gateses (III), the Internet scribe reasons, one arrives at the number 666--symbolic of Satan and all things evil--by "converting the letters of his current name to the ASCII {computer language} values and adding his III." So, if Walt Disney Co. president Michael Ovitz is the "antichrist" (per NBC-TV honcho/O.J. Simpson sympathizer Don Ohlmeyer), does this finding put American Magazine Conference orator Ovitz in bed with the "Forbes 400's" $18-Billion Man? Or do some online chatterers just need a little more excitement in their lives? * Meanwhile, Gates took pains in a USA Today Q&A (October 14) to insist that Microsoft is not a media company (even though it is introducing scads of new "programming" for its revamped online service; see Business Week, October 21). But anyone who's dozed through even 15 minutes of the MSNBC cable service already knows this.