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Comment by zed716 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious in regards to repairs (and perhaps this is just stupidity on my part): Were spare parts for repairs kept on-site, did they have to be ordered/shipped, or did your grandfather have a, er, service truck with parts, etc?

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My father (and I for a bit) worked in IBM field service. The answer is all of the above. You’d carry some common things with you, but most parts needed were picked up at local parts depots that IBM stocked.

For larger clients (like the K Mart stores) we had private pilots on call that could be sent to another city to get a ~$500 part. Especially during holiday shopping season. Some clients had onsite spares but that wasn’t very common. They relied on IBM service to just handle everything. For some customers we had a 2 hour on-site SLA.

For Honeywell mainframes, the maintenance contract required an onsite office for field engineers. In those offices were stored spare parts (mostly for peripheral devices), larger tools such as oscilloscopes, and the repair documentation which took up a lot of space. The CPUs for Honeywell mainframes contained about 80 large circuit boards (about 12" square as I recall) which were too expensive to have a full set of spares on each site. For those, we had several district offices with more extensive parts departments. Field engineers had to carry a small toolkit with them which in addition to traditional tools contained soldering irons and wire-wrap tools.

I was in a resident territory 60 miles from the home office and we stocked a good supply of parts but far from any part you would ever need. My branch office stocked a higher level of parts and would send them to me via taxi if needed. The regional parts center in Atlanta would air freight over night to the Birmingham airport and I would meet the airplane. I had a part removed from a production line machine and sent to me for a repair. Part support was very good. In the 1990s when I was working for TSS we did get vans so we could have some parts with us.

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