HCSD

High Country Service Data is a family owned and run company whose origins date back to 1973. In 1973, Stephen Rendell established a Television sales & repair business in Exeter, a small village in the Southern Highlands of NSW. After working from home for several years, Steve decided to move his service business to Moss Vale (about 10kms north of E... xeter), where the business remained until 1992. In 1987, his eldest son Warwick started working with him part time, and in 1989, after completing his School Certificate, joined the business as a full time Audio technician, servicing CD players and consumer Hi-Fi equipment. Throughout the years that Moss Vale Vision and Sound (as the business had become known) had been running, Steve had made a special point of collecting and cataloguing Service Manuals. A Service Manual is a handbook supplied by the manufacturer of electronic equipment to their service centres to enable repair of particular units. Occasionally, other technicians would contact Steve to see if he had a particular service manual for a unit they were servicing, which they were unable to obtain from the manufacturer. Often this would be due to the unit's obsolescence, in which case the manufacturer might no longer have the service manual required in stock, or sometimes the manufacturer of the equipment had ceased trading. In early 1990, the requests for manuals started to increase as word of the library of service manuals got around. Steve started to formalise the way in which the library (which by then contained nearly three thousand manuals) was handled so that he could keep track of who had which manuals. Starting out as notation on the storage bags that the manuals were kept in, eventually Steve wrote some software into the computer system that the business ran on to enable him to keep track of the current location of each of the manuals out on loan. By 1991, the Australian financial landscape was rather bleak. In the midst of the recession Australia "had to have", costs were going up, and profits ...Read More