Low-tech computer lab - Current Designs and Tekserve in New York City

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1992 by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Inventors Dick Demenus and David Lerner have a state-of-the-art workshop replete with every high-tech tool they need for their business designing audio programs, rebuilding Macintosh computers, and developing hi-fi equipment. But their office is filled with relics--items even more antique than their old Seikosha dot-matrix printer. A cache of artifacts including audio speakers that barely postdate the Victrola, a radio that probably broadcast "The Shadow," a stand-up mike that the Andrews Sisters might have used, and a postage scale Jesse James could have stolen from a mail caravan proves that a high-tech environment doesn't have to look like a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Indeed, Demenus's and Lerner's studio looks more like Gepetto's workshop than like a Macintosh repair shop (Tekserve Corporation) and an electronic-products design company (Current Designs). Nine stools sit around a 5-by-30-foot "test-and-assembly bench," where a rotating staff of 15 part-time workers rebuilds computers and builds prototypes using a clutter of oscilloscopes, voltmeters, watt meters, circuits, diodes, sockets, connectors, magnifying lights, and solderers.

In an industry where some products become obsolete before they even hit the market, the rustic look of Demenus and Lerner's office reflects a nearly outmoded respect for enduring design. "My heart is with the old stuff," says Demenus, who calls himself "an avid collector of everything old .... i like the way old things are made, the craftsmanship. Our philosophy is building things that can last, long-life products with very well-thought-out designs. We don't like the disposable culture."

TIME-SHARING

That affinity for bygone values might also explain the relaxed atmosphere in what is practically a family shop. Demenus and Lerner's business takes up the front half of a 3,000-square-foot loft in lower Manhattan, an industrial space with raw wood floors and crude plaster-and-brick walls that only recently became legal for residential use. Demenus, his wife, Jan, and their daughter, Nora, live in the back, which Demenus has outfitted with, among other things, quirky diagonal shelves of his own design and a grand piano, which features what he calls his night-light--the Empire State Building shining through his bedroom window. The family has free run of the office and depends on the office kitchen; the staff uses the family bathroom. "That's the one hitch," says Demenus. "Time-sharing."

Current Designs was born when Demenus, Lerner, and a third partner, Mike Edl, then engineers at WBAI-FM radio in New York City, designed and built a tourist-proof cassette player for a recorded-tour company. "It was designed to survive repeated drops on marble museum floors," says Demenus, who describes the device as a progenitor to the Walkman. "It gave us the idea that there was a demand for products that could survive heavy public use--and then it just grew organically."

The threesome went on to design listening stations for the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, turntables and headsets that could endure use by football players--and even resist abuse by high school students. "You can sit on it, you can jump on it," Demenus says, demonstrating. The team welcomed the computer age by designing remote-controlled wrist transmitters for factory workers, which greatly improve the efficiency of assembly-line packaging. And they recently contracted with AT&T to build a mock-up of the Smart-Phone, a table with a built-in telephone, Macintosh, and database; users can access telephone directories and make bank transactions without leaving the phone.

DAY-TO-DAY ACTIVITY

In 1990 the team added the Mac repair shop to maintain steady work during the lulls between projects. "We figured if we were going to be here anyway, it'd be good to have a day-to-day activity. That way we could house a staff," says Demenus. In keeping with the team's commitment to durability, the repair shop takes in such urchins as the long-outmoded Mac 512Ke.

After working in their homes for 10 years, Demenus and Lerner moved into a 3,000-square-foot loft in the building they now use. By the time they added TekServe, they realized they didn't need all the space and consolidated into the front half of Demenus's own loft. "Our third partner only comes out at night," adds Demenus. "He doesn't deal with the public, and we think he's a vampire."

Lerner designs circuit boards with Claris's MacCAD design program on his Mac Ilcx with a Radius full-page, black-and-white monitor. Demenus uses a Mac IIci with an AppleColor monitor for CAD applications. They also oversee an internal bulletin board for the New York Mac Users' Group, using their Mac SE30 with a modern and the electronic-mail program QuickMail. They use a Sharp fax machine, an Apple LaserWriter IIf, a CD-ROM drive, a scanner, and, of course, the Seikosha SPIOO0 AP.

For her part, six-year-old Nora has mastered her favorite gadgets-the 10-cent Coke machine and the Mac IIci. Sipping from a 10cent Coke and swiveling in the office's porch swing, she talks to the cat-in-residence, Mehitabel, and observes the day's activity in the family workshop.