The real PC and Mac guys meet

Jobs and Gates trade jests at rare joint appearance

Excerpt:

"PC guy is great, he's got a big heart," the chief of Apple Inc. said on Wednesday, referring to popular television ads in which a hip young man personifies a Macintosh computer and a Windows PC is played by an awkward middle-aged man.

"The art of those commercials is not to be mean, but it's actually for the guys to like each other," Jobs said.

His generous interpretation might have had something to do with the fact that Jobs was sitting next to Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates in their first joint interview in 14 years.

Gates rolled with the joke, saying of the PC guy: "His mother loves him!"

Comment: I'm a PC guy but wish I were a MAC guy and I love these commercials! See NYTimes article for pic of Jobs & Gates together!

NYTimes: For Jobs and Gates, a Night to Reminisce

Excerpt:

Mr. Gates and Mr. 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," Mr. Jobs said.

Apple and Microsoft were business partners at the start of the computer era beginning in 1977 when Mr. Gates supplied a copy of the BASIC programming language for the Apple II computer. Later, Mr. Gates made an early bet on writing software for the Macintosh, two years before the computer was introduced in 1984.