This week the Wall Street Journal hosted their fifth edition of a sold-out conference for tech executives named, appropriately, “All Things Digital” (we’ll call it “D5”, for short). Recently the D5 organizers announced that Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs would appear together on the same stage for an historic Q&A session.

The tech press, of course, had a field day. Some opined the epic meeting of the two tech titans would become a no-holds-barred slugfest. They were wrong. It was more of a nostalgic hug-fest between two men reflecting on the revolutions they started in their youth.

There were, however, a few jabs thrown here and there. We’ll get to the “blow by blow” later, as the “undercard” was noteworthy as well.

Earlier in the day Microsoft’s current CEO Steve Ballmer took the D5 stage to present interesting new technology from Microsoft called “Surface”. You’ll remember that Apple’s late-June-release iPhone uses touch-screen technology. Microsoft’s Surface is touch-screen on a bigger scale. Think of a coffee table top that is a touch-sensitive screen. Using your fingers, you manipulate images on the screen, ala Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report”. Below the tabletop are video projectors that provide the images, similar to a projection TV.

Microsoft plans to begin shipping products using Surface technology later this year, primarily to hotels, retail establishments, restaurants, and public entertainment venues (casinos, perhaps?). Blue (as in “blue screen of death”) will probably be the most popular color. But, I digress.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also had some solo time on the D5 stage. He hinted that improvements to Apple’s .Mac internet services package were soon forthcoming. He announced that a new version of Apple TV with a 160 GB hard drive would be shipping immediately for $399 (versus the current 40 GB model for $299). He also announced that a mid-June software update would be available to enable Apple TV users to view YouTube content direct from the internet. I don’t know if this is a particularly good or a bad thing – we’ll wait and see.

When asked about the popularity of Apple’s iTunes software on the Windows platform, Jobs replied “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell”. Jab.

Then it was time for Jobs and Gates to take the stage together. They reminisced about “the good old days”, like how Apple had purchased the floating-point code for their Apple II computer’s Basic programming language from Microsoft for $31,000, which was delivered to Apple on cassette tapes.

When asked what the other had contributed to the industry, Jobs complimented Gates on “being focused on software before anyone else had a clue”. Gates credited Jobs with building products “we want to use ourselves”, and pursuing that with “an incredible taste and elegance”.

As far as the future of computing, both men agreed that single-function and network computers hadn’t caught on, and that future computers would rely on what Gates described as “rich local functionality” to be successful.

The two differed, however, on whether it was better to create both the software and hardware (Apple’s model) or create software to run on a myriad on other manufacturer’s computers (the Microsoft model).

Jobs remembered that when they started out, both of them were often the youngest guys in the room. Now they’re often the oldest. He quoted a line from the Beatles song, “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead”. Whether it was an oblique reference to Gates’ decade-old prophetic book “The Road Ahead” or not, it was a touching reminder of their shared past.