A Newly Discovered Dinner Party Guest List Proves Steve Jobs Met Margaret Thatcher In 1984
Few people seem to have known about, or remembered, the meeting.
We only found about it today because the Margaret Thatcher Trust has been releasing papers from the late premier's archives, and among those papers has emerged a 30-year-old gem: A menu and guest list, according to The Telegraph.
Jobs was only 29, and he had just launched the Apple Macintosh computer with his famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial. The pair ate sea bass and a raspberry dessert, The Telegraph says:
Edward Streator, a US diplomat who also attended the dinner, told the Telegraph that the idea behind the event was "to get a powerhouse of leading American businessmen to come over and meet the prime minister."
He added: "Jobs was one of the younger people there. We were very pleased that he accepted the invitation. He was a wunderkind but he was also quiet. Jobs was informal but he wore black tie like all the other men. He wasn't a Richard Branson-type who didn't wear a tie."
"It's almost certain Thatcher and Jobs would have met because it was a small event and an effort was made to introduce everyone to the prime minster."
Unfortunately, no one seems to have remembered what the pair said to each other. At the time, Jobs would probably not have been regarded as a very important person. The 1980s were still the infancy of personal computing, and most people just didn't use a computer for anything.