And so the day after going to A Midsummer Night’s Dream we had a field trip to IBM Almaden, their research facility in Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed it, we got to see a lot of cool stuff and see what they’re working on.

They gave us the “Hi we’re IBM” spiel, just an overview of what they’re doing and why they’re so great. The first place we went was some sort of device that could see the locations atoms on a surface called a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. This way they can look at the locations of certain molecules and atoms, do something to them and then see what happens after. I’m not much of a natural sciences person but it was pretty cool what they could do with it. They’re not really working towards any certain goals or products, just seeing what they can come up with.

After lunch we saw the rapid prototyping lab. When someone is working on developing new hardware, they can have a test version made of it before sending it off to be made. They have a machine that makes any object out of a plastic substance by “printing” it.

3D printer making platic wrenches.

Something they “printed.” The gears on this thing all move together. This is done all in one printing, the machine prints dissolvable stuff to separate pieces.

More cool stuff from the prototyping lab:

1956 IBM Ramac - The first hard drive - 5 MB

After IBM a few of us went to Apple headquarters. One of the girls’ boyfriend works at Apple so he kind of got us “in.” I was hoping we’d get to look around more, but we basically saw the lobby and courtyard. They have a cool board that shows the a ton of apps and each one bubbles when it’s purchased. We also went to the Apple company store and I bought a t-shirt :). I really wanted this jacket that I’d seen my coworkers at the Apple store wearing, but it wasn’t worth the money.

Random stuff with an apple on it!