Sam Roberts at The New York Times (gift link), reporting heartbreaking 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.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Lorren Erstad, his only immediate survivor.

Truly, Fuck. Cancer.

Tekserve was a tremendously welcoming space, filled with wonder and delight. When the store closed in 2016 I wrote on Twitter:

🙁 always loved Tekserve. Was my go-to store for years.

In the late-’80s and well into the ’90s, I would often visit just to see what new hardware and software had been released and to chat to other Mac users. It didn’t feel like there were a lot of us back then, but the lot of us loved Tekserve. Lerner (and his co-founder Dick Demenus) built a community in the shape of a store.

RIP.