We went to visit the Lenovo plant in Beijing with our ISYE 3104 Warehousing class. It was pretty cool to get to see the inside of a manufacturing plant and its warehouse and assembly lines.
When we got inside, they asked us to put on the white clean room suits. Since Lenovo manufactures computers, their shop floor is very dust sensitive. Not quite as sensitive as the wafer fab plant that we visited, but still needed the bunny suits.
Of course a few of the guys decided to be cool and wear their sunglasses with their clean room suits.
Alex and Lindsay are wearing the little headphones that the tour guide used to talk to us while walking through the shop floor. It was pretty noisy inside and we had a fairly large group of about 30 students, so these headsets actually worked quite well.
We also got special orange visitor badges. And we had to wear slippers over our shoes, as you can see on Christine's feet.
After visiting the manufacturing side of the Lenovo plant, we went to visit the office buildings.
I liked the artificial water fountain thing that they had next to the building.
They took us through their museum that showcased the development of their company from the 1980s until today. Here is one of the first PC's that they designed.
To start the tour, the guide asked someone to throw a paper airplane through the window. Here is our professor, Dr. Chen Zhou, reaching for one of the airplanes to toss through the window.
Chris didn't actually get to start the tour, he's just demonstrating how to throw a paper airplane.
They had a GIANT paper airplane!! I totally want to make one this size. Probably would need a few rolls of butcher paper or something though.
Lenovo used to be called Legend, back in the day. And then they bought out the PC side of IBM.
Here is another one of their ancient computers. I think this was the first laptop. Check out the floppy disk next to it :)
Lenovo also designed the Olympic torch for the Beijing 2008 games. I got to hold one of the replicas of the torch! It was lighter than I thought it would be. I can't imagine running with this in my hand.
There are many different Lenovo locations across the world. Their US headquarters are based in Raleigh, somewhere inside the RTP area.
JQ is pretending to be our tour guide and showing us one of the displays of the more recent computers.
I have no idea why they had World of Warcraft figurines in their little museum display. This was in a fake dorm room area, where they had displayed both their PC and their laptop as well as some other random electronic accessories they make like scrolling picture frames.
This is a display of some of the hardware components inside their computers.
Lenovo recently designed a laptop with an extendable screen, I think it is meant for people to do artsy fartsy design stuff. This computer was supposed to be released in August but I think they pushed the release date back to December.
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