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Let me tell you about some of the places that I got to visit over the summer.

I'll start with one that actually happened last year (2015), back in November, myself and a few my colleagues got to visit the HP Experience Centre, in central Melbourne (somewhere on Collins Street).

I'm kind of regretting that I didn't get a photo of it now, but I didn't want to give away how much of a nerd I am, but they had a HP 80 Series workstation on display, I think specifically an 86 model with a monitor, but my memory is a bit hazy, I've got the HP museum to thank for this, as the picture on this page that I have linked here is very similar to what I saw.

I was too focused on admiring the HP z840 Workstation, that could support to 2TB of memory, Mmm imagine the amount of browser tabs one could have open.

We've got to play around with an unreleased prototype competitor to the Microsoft Surface, and now I have a fairly good understanding of what a engineering sample is.

Inconsequentially, I found myself at IBM earlier this month, can't remember what actually for but I did get to check out their data center, I'm pretty certain there was a mainframe out in the foyer, but that may have been a display model.

Data centres always adopt a certain aesthetic, this one was no different right down to the false floors and ceilings, although a bit modern and from what I have seen around the campus, some of the other buildings we have around the site are actually ex-IBM data centers (right down to the brown analog rotary phone in the corner), I even made a remark to my colleague who told me the room has been unchanged since the 1970's... [Something that I had wish I had taken the time to take a photo of, although with respect to the site owners].

Popping back to Melbourne now, just over the Queen Street bridge and in sight of the Eureka tower (I'm pretty certain it's near South bank), we went and visited the Microsoft offices.

We were given a presentation from members of the SES, and insight into the development of training resources making use of virtual reality, this was really cool and changed my perception of how learning materials are generally taught in the classroom. - some of the subject matter was horrific to hear about but was understandable given the context.