Heritage

Heritage

From Page A1

Louise van Dort, president of the BlueRidgeMac Service company became convinced a decade ago that it was silly that Apple computer users had to drive to Richmond or Tysons Comer to buy a computer and obtain service for their machines.

She was living in Washington, Va., on sick leave from a successful career as an interior designer when she took a computer course simplified “for idiots,” as she recalls, at the suggestion of a friend.

“The course was taught with a Mac,” she said in a recent interview, “and after the second lesson, I went out and bought one.

“As with all new computer users,” she said, “you need help and you find out that you have to drive to Tysons Comer to get it. That took two trips and I said, that’s not good enough.1”

From this beginning a second successful career was bom, first in Washington and since last July in Woodville.

“You learned you could crack the case of the computer and what was in there was really very simple,” she said. She began helping people care for their computers “on the side.”

She found that many of her neighbors in what she calls “little Washington” were running Mac computers: “Peter Luke, Douglas Baumgardner, Peter Kramer to name a few. If you ask Diane Bruce, she’ll tell you a Mac.”

Electronic commuting— working at home by computer— and the growing role of computers in small business, have made the county a lively market for computer sales and service.

The Apple Company required van Dort to become certified to do her business and soon it grew from an avocation to a vocation. She now can do everything in Woodville that a store in Richmond, Tysons Comer or Washington, D.C. can do.

In fact, she claims, she does more, going out to an owner’s house or office and setting the computer up and making sure the early days run smoothly.

Last July, wanting to expand, van Dort moved her