This was taken recently at a local Books A Million. I first heard of them when I traveled to D.C. in 2002. They took over the space once held by Borders since they went bankrupt around 2009, specifically I am not sure because I do not frequent Concord.
Due to an apparent low overhead, most of the elements of Borders is still visible (including a Nortel Companion wireless station!) I’m kinda not surprised, given how some cutovers by integrators don’t fully do site evals like they used to.
The phone system is not a Norstar. In fact it is an Avaya Partner system. This one is a “Partner 6D” terminal. Released to market just a year before the Lucent spinoff (yes I’ve seen sets with AT&T labeling), it too had a “European” look. In short, curves were the style of electronics made by European companies, and unofficially got named “Euro” by the thirdhand resellers.
Even worse, a decade later, around 2005, Avaya introduced refresh to sets that mimicked the 2400s and 4600 terminals but it fell to another Internet marketing hoax. Early on, the thirdhand resellers on sites like eBay started to call these sets “Euro Series II” or “Euro Series 2” despite Avaya (or it’s decedents) never, ever referring this line in official marketing or the Comcode description or their offerings as public records mandates if Avaya sold to state or local governments. Such PDFs have floated online. Some Designation strips, that used paper created by third parties even had “Euro” on the desi paper.
When contacting an official Avaya or Business Partner (BP) rep, just do yourself a favor and not request with using the “Euro” phrase.
Under the hood of all Partner telephones including the Multi Line System or MLS sets; all used a model number of 7317H. The various 6, 18 and 34 button sets probably had some suffix after said number, but not unique like say an 8400 series with a model number of “8410D0A1” for the 10 button set.
For real hardcore Avaya geeks, the 7300 model was originally for Merlin sets, that used analog/electrical technology to provide lamp information, and digital/low voltage to process voice, and also to provide analog telephones through an adjunct. The larger systems supported “hybrid lines” but never any Partner sets.
Both the “Euro” “Partner” or MLS were backwards compatible – only on the smallest and largest mid-sized systems, where an MLS phone could be used on an ACS R7 and a Partner 18D could run on the first release of the Partner system from 25 years ago. IP Office, I am unable to confirm independently.
The “evergreen”-like promise went only the next system up – the Merlin Legend/Magix system – using it’s own board. The reason why it couldn’t go larger was AT&T noticed their largest clients were using Merlin phones on say a System 85 in the masses and abused the intention of using smaller system phones was from a cutover from a said existing system.
Over it’s near twenty year history, the Partners was officially touted by Avaya of over million systems were installed. It would be an understatement to see these systems still functioning to this day despite marketing pushing customers over to the IP Office platform.
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