In 1987, 14 years before the first Apple Store opened, two former engineers from a decidedly anti-establishment radio station started fixing Macs on the side, and an independent repair shop called Tekserve was born.

Over the course of nearly 30 years, they gained a cult following among Mac users with a Manhattan store that featured an eclectic mix of antique technology and quirky displays of the modern stuff; the antithesis of the antiseptic Apple Store interior. But earlier this month, Tekserve closed its doors, a victim of sky high commercial rents and intense retail competition.

“Tekserve was a planet unto itself,” said Chester Higgins, Jr., a loyal customer who spent 40 years as a staff photographer at The New York Times. “When I have a problem with a computer, I want to get it fixed as quickly as possible so I can get back into my workflow. Nobody had the turnaround time that Tekserve had.”

And apparently nobody had Tekserve’s design sense, which many attributed to co-founder Dick Demenus. Visitors to the cavernous storefront marveled at the scores of antique radios, old microphones, and electrical meters lining the walls. A room devoted to pro audio had glass doors that came from The Sands casino in Las Vegas. Visitors could buy an 8oz. bottle of Coke for a nickel from a 1950’s vending machine. Customers waiting to see an intake technician in the service department would take a decidedly analog deli counter ticket and watch for their number to be displayed on old Macs kept alive from the 1980s.

Apple CEO Tim Cook once visited Tekserve and declared it “interesting,” according to the store’s co-founder, David Lerner. But Tekserve was a funky counterpoint to the Apple Store aesthetic, which Demenus argued has no hint of history.

“I want to respect those who came before,” said Demenus. “And whether it’s a typewriter or an electron tube or a radio, those technologies in those disciplines are what built the foundation for what came next. And what came next was computers.”

The Mac Museum Finds a New Home
In the back of the store, every model of the Mac ever made was displayed behind a glass partition with a timeline in Tekserve’s Mac Museum. The collection was purchased for $47,000 at an auction held last week.

Among the 35 computers was a NeXT Cube developed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985; a 20th Anniversary Mac; and a Macintosh 128k signed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Will Roland, director of special projects for Manhattan-based Roland Auctions, declined to identify the purchaser of the Mac museum or what the plans were for them. He would only say that the new owner was a Silicon Valley start-up (see more in the slideshow above).

Most of the collection was acquired over the last 30 years by Demenus, who frequented auctions and yard sales in the Catskills near his country home. Demenus accumulated so much stuff that one visitor described his collecting style as “controlled hoarding.” An upcoming episode of the reality TV show American Pickers will feature Demenus’s collection, which also fills his loft a few doors down from the Tekserve storefront.

Demenus told PCMag that he’s currently in “divestiture mode,” but adds with a mischievous chuckle, “I kept the stuff I really liked.”

The auction was conducted before a live audience in the store and hundreds of online bidders, and it showed that Apple fanboys are willing to shell out big bucks for Apple swag. A pair of folding director chairs with the Apple logo on them went for $800. A “Think Different” poster featuring a photo of a young Bob Dylan fetched $1,600.

Other computer gear sold at the auction included: two Newton MessagePads, four Apple Cameras, a Kaypro 2000 portable computer, a Timex Sinclair PC, and a plastic IBM Think sign, which was surely a bargain at $250.

Image courtesy of Roland AuctionsA bunch of bidders went for a Mac that was melted in a fire despite the description of “No Hard Drive… Distortion of plastic body, charring.” The toasted desktop went for $1,200, prompting Demenus to joke, “I’m going into business melting Macs.”

Auction organizer Will Roland thinks the items’ connection to the beloved Mac shop accounted for almost everything in the auction being sold, most of it above market value. Besides a large following in the film, audio, and graphic arts community, Tekserve’s celebrity customers included Hampton Fancher, who wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner, comedian Fred Armisen, the late punk rocker Joey Ramone, and actor Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films. “Hey, you guys at Tekserve are PRECIOUS!” Serkis wrote on a movie poster in the store.

Tekserve was so well known in New York that it had a cameo on the hit TV show Sex and the City in an episode titled “My Motherboard, Myself.” When Carrie Bradshaw’s PowerBook crashes, she brings it to Tekserve, where an intake technician (The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi) berates her for not backing up.

The auction was definitely a nostalgic look at consumer electronics from the last century. Bidders bought an airline travel phonograph, a JVC portable stereo cassette deck, a Sony Watchman TV, a 16mm film viewer/splicer, a Morse Code key, a wire recorder, and a Speak-o-phone, which records directly to vinyl discs.

In the not-quite-electronics department, there was a Rotary Mimeograph machine circa 1910, a Cold War-era Russian high-altitude helmet complete with oxygen hose and communication cables, a pre-1950 Mahogany telephone booth with rotary payphone, and a World War II search light mirror, which no home should be without. Somebody also bought the sign that hung above the store’s entrance.

Nicholas Brancaccio, a San Francisco software programmer, paid $250 for a 1946 RCA Victor TV set that came with an after-market magnifying lens. The 26-year-old geek plans to put some new parts into his 70-year-old TV, then hook it up to an old computer or video game console.

“I love repairing these magical artifacts,” said Brancaccio.

Employees Say a Fond Farewell
Tekserve wasn’t just beloved by its customers. Many employees said it was the best place they ever worked. The store’s diverse workforce included white-haired baby boomers, tattooed millennials, many people of color, and women technicians. More than one employee came from its customer base.

Deb Travis was having some RAM installed in one of her Macs when co-owner David Lerner mentioned that he thought Tekserve’s female customers would feel more comfortable if there were more women techs working there. Travis started as a technician at Tekserve and over the course of 20 years rose to the position of service manager.

Tekserve had so many musicians— some of whom toured— that it put out a series of CDs showcasing their work. No surprise from an employer who provided all of its 100 plus workers with health insurance and free lunch several days a week. Demenus even took 100 employees at a time to go see first-run science-fiction films in theaters.

Tekserve’s owners and its techs had something in common: serious technical chops. Demenus and Lerner started fixing their own Macs, which they used to design and build such electronic products as vandal-proof listening stations for a library at Lincoln Center and a cassette player that withstood the wear and tear inflicted on it by museum goers listening to audio tours. Initially, they relied on early Mac drawing programs to make illustrations of parts that needed to be manufactured and printed circuit boards. Before Tekserve took off, they designed and built a high-tech pill box that beeped when it was time to take medication, a tanning machine, and a high-tech bedroom for a wealthy client, complete with TVs that came out of the furniture.

It was a design defect in the original Macs that provided the two former radio engineers with a business opportunity. Lacking a fan, the original Macs would eventually overheat and fail. Though Apple charged $300 to replace the analog board, Tekserve did it for $135. Years later, when the power inlet on Mac laptops went intermittent, instead of replacing the entire logic board as Apple was wont to do, Tekserve’s repair team soldered on a new jack, saving customers hundreds of dollars in the process. Over the years Tekserve techs discovered a number of problems and fixes for Macs before Apple did.

“We didn’t take the off-the-shelf answers,” said David Cook, another Tekserve customer who later became the hiring manager. “There was a real burning desire to understand things at a deeper level.”

Demenus could sometimes be seen sitting at his cluttered desk in the basement using a stereo microscope while soldering and un-soldering tiny electronic components. He once hacked an iMac with a white hemispherical base, adding a second flat panel monitor to it. The “two-headed iMac” debuted at the Tekserve booth at Macworld and was later put on display in the store.

“It was just awesome,” recalls Asher Rapkin, who worked at Tekserve as a college student and went on to work for Apple corporate in California. “This is so much of why I think people would come in. Because while you were sitting there stressed out waiting to find out if your data was going to get saved, you could play with a two-headed iMac.”

Or drink a Coke that cost just a nickel.