The San Jose Mercury News has a nice human-interest article about Apple's recent donation of twenty years' worth of Apple memoribilia to Stanford's "History of Silicon Valler" library. As previously noted, Apple finally decided it couldn't afford to open a museum celebrating its own past, and gave 2000 boxes of AppleStuff™ to the Stanford collection. Among the items in the boxes are early memos, wooden models, signed manuals, hand-drawn floor plans, and t-shirts that chronicle the rocky history of our fave computer maker.

The part of the story that fascinates us, though, is Monica Ertell, the woman who has spent the last eighteen years of her life collecting these bits of Apple's past. Monica lost her job this fall, when Apple made the donation to Stanford. But she describes the experience as "bittersweet," instead of just bitter; she knows the collection is in good hands, and she in fact celebrated the transfer with champagne.

At first we wondered who could spend eighteen years collecting bric-a-brac from Apple Computer. Then we remembered the Mac SE we have sitting in the corner, the "Mac OS 8 Tour" CD-ROMS (from back when Mac OS 8 was Copland) on the bookshelf, the eWorld installer diskettes in the junk drawer, and the large stack of Apple logo temporary tattoos still sitting in a MacWorld Expo bag from three years ago-- and it doesn't sound so strange anymore. ;-)

Now, don't go jumping up and down just yet, but Apple Recon is speculating that Apple may do better than expected this quarter-- and they may even post a profit. Yes, we know that flies in the face of just about everything we've all been hearing, but Recon has a pretty decent track record when it comes to predicting stuff like this. Information from Apple sources (who risked "job, limb, and life" to report in) about "awesome" G3 sales and Apple Store success indicates that Apple may have already beat its predicted sales performance mark and may be poised to surprise Wall Street when the final numbers become public. Recon even interprets the recent cancellation of Apple's post-MacWorld Expo sales meeting as a possible reason to celebrate (strange, but true).

Recon, as usual, posts heavy caveats around their prediction, stating that other sources are contradictorily reporting that Apple's sales are "terrible." But it's nice to dream... Can you all imagine a profitable quarter? We can hardly remember what they're like. (We don't count the Amelio profit, since it seemed so obviously a result of number-juggling in order to qualify for a bonus.)