Originally published at: Remembering David Lerner of Tekserve - TidBITS
In the New York Times, Sam Roberts shares the sad news:
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.
I wasn’t close to David, but our orbits intersected on a number of occasions. Long ago, I gave a presentation at Tekserve in Manhattan, which our friends Sharon Zardetto Aker and Rich Wolfson used as an excuse to come into the city; Rich remembers playing pinball with our son Tristan during the talk. David was also a regular on TidBITS Talk as far back as 2009, and both he and Tekserve appeared in TidBITS a handful of times.
In 2000, I lauded the 25-page booklet Tekserve was giving out at Macworld Expo as the Most Valuable Free Handout (see “Macworld Expo 2000 NY Other Superlatives,” 31 July 2000)—in retrospect, I suspect that booklet may well have been Sharon’s work, since she did some writing for Tekserve over the years. When Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard shipped, we published an article about how Tekserve was donating to the Snow Leopard Trust’s fundraising program to help endangered snow leopards (see “Protecting Snow Leopard’s Namesake Cats,” 16 September 2009). But Tekserve had to compete with multiple Apple Stores in Manhattan and was eventually forced to close its famed retail operation (see “MacNN and Tekserve Close, EveryMac and Mactracker Carry On,” 8 July 2016). A year later, we reported that “MacPaw Bought the Tekserve Apple Collection” (11 May 2017), which included a 128K Mac signed by Steve Wozniak. Let’s hope it’s still safe in Kyiv.
But perhaps David’s most interesting, albeit fictional, appearance in TidBITS came in my short-lived but fun foray into writing tech analysis in noir style. In “The Mystery of the Leopard Ship Date: Solved” (16 April 2007), I quoted him as saying:
“I’m personally disappointed, because I was looking forward to Time Machine.” This wasn’t surprising from a man who signs his email, ‘May You have 1000 Backups and Never Need One.’
I can’t remember how I got the quote, but that really was his email signature, and David did care deeply about backups. That’s what made the Sex and the City scene where Carrie Bradshaw has to take her PowerBook to Tekserve so grating—she admits she doesn’t back up her work and had gotten rid of the manual “in a feng shui attack.” In 2001, that wasn’t charming or quirky for a professional writer; it was avoidable negligence presented as a TV trope of helplessness about technology.