Joel over at BoingBoing Gadgets posted his thoughts on his latest vintage electronics find, The Bynamics Desk Director System Six Hundred, which originally sold for nearly $900.
It looks like a calculator, a phone, a volume pedal and a digital clock glued to a piece of cardboard, yet it is a gestalt artifact and somehow seems more important than that. Just what exactly was it a “system” for, though? I’ll tell you. Obviously, it was a “system” for getting corporate boo-tay back in the 80s. A status marker to symbolize that you made so much dough-re-mi, you could afford to have a $900 phone, that would look good on or off the Death-Star. Clearly it established “Player-ship”, back in the day. End of story.
These days, it’s even cooler than it was during the era of Savings & Loan meltdowns and Joel has done it proud by even putting the little glass of Scotch, exactly where it should be in any corporate situation—smack dab in the middle of things!
Hi there!
I was the sales person at Bynamics who sold the first 1A2 system in Canada that was not a Bell Canada product, that being the Bynamics System 600.
It was a really cool system at the time and Bell Canada had just been forced to “unbundle” it’s rate structure and allow other companies to sell multiline business phone systems. They didn’t much like that and spent some time harassing my multiline clients, those being mostly small businesses which might have purchased small pbx systems from Ma Bell in Canada.
I had one of the original 1A2 units in California where I moved after leaving Toronto in 1999, but left it there when I moved to my current home in Fortaleza, Brazil.
I would buy another if I could guarantee getting it into the country without paying tax seeing that it is an antique!
They were made with an aluminum frame and with very high grade leather…on both sides…top ANB bottom, so they woun’t scratch expensive desks. All the screws on the bottom were counter-sunk so they wouldn’t stratch the desk surface.
There were many features butbthe most popular was the state-of-the-art full duplex hands-free system developed in conjunction with Mitel in Ottawa Canada. There were business and shareholder ties with that company and Bynamics at the time.
Andy Neill
Fortaleza, Brazil