David Lerner, cofounder of Tekserve, has died

Summary

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72.The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Lorren Erstad, his only immediate survivor.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). “Sometimes it seems as though everyone with a Mac in New York has been to Tekserve,” he added.Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.He and Mr. Demenus transformed a two-man operation in Mr. Demenus’s loft apartment into a business whose customers were as eclectic as the 200 or so employees who served them at makeshift help desks well before Apple formally established and branded “genius bars” in their stores.Jan Albert, Mr. Demenus’s wife, remembered on Facebook “the immense respect” that the company showed to “the creative folks who worked there — technically adept actors, musicians, inventors, writers and many young women who would shine, given their first chance to work with rapidly evolving technology.”During the nearly three decades before Tekserve sh...