David Lerner, ein Mr. Fix-it von Apple Computers, stirbt im Alter von 72 Jahren

Gift link. Excerpt:

> 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](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/technology/circuits/20STOR.html) [alternate link without paywall] 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).