
He later returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he received a Ph.D. The following year he received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Beta Sigma chapter. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II. About six months later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIes. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. He was able to reverse engineer its ROM and write programs for it. He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the 1970s.

His father was a radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's radiology practice in Pittsburgh. Russinovich was born in Salamanca, Spain and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, until he was 15, when he moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
