Mark E. Russinovich (1966) is a software engineer and software architect for Microsoft. He was born in Salamanca, Spain in 1966 and was raised in Birmingham, AL, until he was 15, and then moved to Pittsburgh, PA with his family. His father was a radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's radiology practice in Pittsburgh. When Mark began taking an interest in programming at age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a TI99/4A. About six months later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIe's.