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Gates and Jobs, Together

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have indeed appeared together before.

There's a lot of anticipation of next week's event at the D Conference in which Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will appear together. But there's a lot of hype, too, including the assertion that Jobs and Gates haven't appeared together since 1983. That's interesting, because here's what certainly looks like a picture of the two of them having lunch with Walt Mossberg at a previous D conference in 2005. I suppose this could be a Photoshop creation, but the Journal release notes that "both have made multiple individual appearances" at the conference in the past. So I'm guessing it's more likely that MarketWatch got the facts wrong.

UPDATE: There's more photos of this event here. It seems C/Net picked up and repeated MarketWatch's report. Meanwhile, a post at Digg almost immediately surfaced the 2005 photos.

UPDATE #2: John Shinal of Marketwatch e-mailed to say that he was aware of the 2005 meeting between Jobs and Gates. "That was a private conversation," John writes. "A public conversation means the public is privy to it." John's article stated that "the two industry icons have never had a public conversation." So John is technically correct, but I'm not the only one who immediately found the statement curious.

If you haven't already, check out All Things D, the new site Walt and Kara Swisher are running.