David Lerner, New York’s Mac repair guru, dies at 72
Sam Roberts of the New York Times reports on the death of a fixture of Mac and Apple culture in New York, David Lerner of Tekserve:
In 1987, 14 years before the first Apple Store, Mr. Lerner and Dick Demenus, a fellow former engineer at WBAI, the counterculture listener-supported FM radio station in New York, started what became Tekserve, a warren of workshops in four locations on West 23rd Street. The company was an immediate success.
In a single day, Mr. Lerner told The New York Times in 2002, the company sold computers to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission (an international public policy network and regular quarry of conspiracists) and the Communist Party (whose offices were down the block).
Back in the day, when there were no Apple Stores, shops like Tekserve saved the bacon of Mac users on a regular basis. I never visited Tekserve, but it was legendary.