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No sparks as Gates, Jobs share stage

In a highly anticipated encounter, Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp and Steve Jobs of Apple Inc took the stage on Wednesday evening to relive old battles and alliances and speculate about the future of digital culture and technology.

Rivals for three decades, the two executives have rarely appeared in public together and have generally been viewed as bitter rivals, despite occasional partnerships.

In front of about 600 technology executives at the "D: All Things Digital" conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, the two executives attracted the attention usually reserved for rock singers and Hollywood stars.

However, attendees who went to the conference hoping for fireworks or a confrontation were disappointed.

The mild tone to the session did not take anything away from the event and after discussing the past and present of the computing industry, the two were greeted with a standing ovation.

Gates and Jobs largely pioneered the personal computer industry beginning in 1975 and 1976 and they spent part of the evening sharing memories of those days.

Today "we ship these computers with one or two gigabytes and nobody remembers 128 kilobytes," Jobs said.

Apple and Microsoft were business partners at the start of the computer era beginning in 1977 when Gates supplied a copy of the BASIC programming language for the Apple II computer.

Later, Gates made an early bet on writing software for the Macintosh, two years before the computer was introduced in 1984.

Neither was willing to acknowledge the possibility that the personal computer era they had helped create would end anytime soon.

"The PC has proven to be very resilient," Jobs said.

At the same time they called themselves believers in the explosion of hand-held communications devices, also known as "Post PC devices."

Gates said he was sometimes frustrated by the fact that the players in the industry changed so quickly.

"I miss it when people come and go. It's nice when people stick around and it gives us some context," he said.

Neither man was willing to say harsh things about the other and Jobs summed up his feelings by quoting from a Beatles song: "`You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead,' that's clearly true here," he said.
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