Holy cats, Stanford hit the jackpot! Apple, in a bout of late spring cleaning (really late spring cleaning), just gave them 2,000 boxes of stuff, according to a Reuters article. (Apparently it was either that, or hold a garage sale.) And when we say "stuff," we mean stuff; it's all memorabilia that illustrates the 21-year history of our fave computer company. Stanford expects it to nicely flesh out its "History of Silicon Valley" collections.

Although Stanford's library curator has only gone through about 1% of the collection, he notes that among the artifacts are an original Apple I and even prototypes for computers that never actually got produced. Apple had been hoarding all of this equipment to put into an Apple museum, which unfortunately never came to be. (If it had, we'd probably have to schedule a yearly pilgrimage.) As it stands, Stanford expects it'll take a year to go through everything and catalog it all.

Guys? If there's too much for you to deal with, we'll take a few cartons off your hands... How about that one over there, with the Lisa peeking out?

Stanford's probably not crying too hard that they didn't get a prototype "Artemis" in their donation... Following MacOS Rumors' recent information on Apple's new all-in-one G3-based Powermac, they are now reporting that Apple has gotten "overwhelmingly negative feedback" about the case's design, which one early tester had described as having "big ugly humps on its back" and "a face that could scare children." Rumors even provides an ftp link to an artist's conception, but you may have a tough time connecting. We kept trying, though, and when we finally saw it... well, we were sorry we kept trying. Think early-90's Ford Taurus Wagon. Yuck. :-P

Taking the hint, Apple is now said to be redesigning the beast into something "quite different" and hopefully more palatable. Pretty much anything would be an improvement...

In a press release timestamped 8:45 AM EST, Apple officially announced that the Rhapsody Mac OS compatibility layer known as the "Blue Box" would be shipped to developers as an add-on to the Rhapsody Developer Release, which shipped last month.

As of 10:22 this morning, Macintouch had still been reporting that "Despite an earlier rumor that a Blue Box (Mac OS mode for PowerPC) would debut about now," the Blue Box wouldn't ship until Rhapsody Premier in early 1998, based on a MacWEEK article. That article, however, simply states that "Apple said it is on track to ship the Blue Box... as part of the Premier Release, due in early 1998." Apparently that doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't ship a developer release sooner. (Macintouch has posted the correct information now.)

The article also states that Apple has shipped Rhapsody DR1 for PC Compatibles, as well as DR1 of the Yellow Box for Windows. (Does this all seem uncharacteristically prolific of Apple?)