During the third quarter of 1974 we received ARPA's permission to undertake, on a trial basis, the maintenance of the network nodes in the Washington, D.C. area with NCC personnel, rather than utilizing the Honeywell maintenance organization. As reported at that time we expected, after some experience with this arrangement, to be able to recommend either reversion to the previous arrangement with Honeywell or expansion of direct BBN responsibility to other network nodes.
Late in the first quarter of 1975 we reviewed the experience in Washington and recommended to ARPA that BBN maintenance responsibility be extended to all network nodes in the continental U.S.; that is, all nodes except Hawaii, Norway, and London. With ARPA's verbal concurrence, we notified Honeywell that contract maintenance was no longer desired as of July 1, 1975. We plan to provide maintenance with permanent staff located in the Boston, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. We have also begun the acquisition of spare parts and diagnostic equipment for these technicians (of course, much of this has already been acquired for the Washington technician). [BBN Report 3063, pg 9]