Authors' Biographies
Both Authors, Paul Druker and Yury Avrutin, were born in Moscow, in what was then the indivisible U.S.S.R. They met in the first grade of a Moscow elementary school, quickly striking a friendship which was to last a lifetime. After Mr. Avrutin had left Russia for the U.S. and while Mr. Druker remained in Moscow, they maintained their close friendship in spite of being separated by the Iron Curtain for almost twenty years. Mr. Druker and Mr. Avrutin have collaborated on several projects in Russia and the U.S. since the fall of the U.S.S.R. During the work on The Comprehensive Russian Computer Dictionary, Mr. Druker was responsible for the master database; Mr. Avrutin wrote its internet counterpart. The Comprehensive Russian Computer Dictionary is the first joint printed publication of Mr. Druker and Mr. Avrutin in the U.S.

Paul Druker has been interested in computers and programming since early high school. He began programming professionally in the seventies using a Russian programming language for the Soviet Minsk-32 mainframe computer. To this day, it remains the only coding experience in his native language, since shortly thereafter, Soviet-designed computers had ceased to exist, being rapidly replaced by U.S. technology, specifically by Russian-built clones of IBM 370 mainframes. Mr. Druker, as most in his field at the time in Russia, found himself learning American technical terminology and has been working in English ever since.

During his professional career, Mr. Druker programmed in more than a dozen of computer languages, such as Assembler, Algol, Fortran, Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, C/C++, ObjectPAL, PL/SQL and became highly knowledgeable in database design and implementation.

In the early nineties in Moscow, Mr. Druker was freelancing as a technical translator and to his astonishment he discovered no modern English-Russian computer dictionaries on the Russian market. As a result, he and two of his colleagues decided to compile and publish their own dictionary. The project was an unqualified success, leading to two sold-out editions of 40,000 copies the IBM PC User's English-Russian Dictionary.

Mr. Druker graduated from Moscow Institute of Electronic Machinery with a Master's of Science in Applied Mathematics and Moscow Railroad Institute with a Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering.

Mr. Druker is an expert in database design, development and administration. He currently holds a position of an Oracle DBA at Perot Systems Corp., in Reston, VA. Previously, Mr. Druker designed and administered Oracle databases at IEEE Computer Society headquarters in Washington, DC.

Paul Druker emigrated with his family to the United States in 1993. Presently, Mr. Druker lives in Northern Virginia, in the Washington suburbs with his wife, two teenage sons, a dog and two cats. The Drukers enjoy travelling, bike riding, playing ping pong, and surfing the Internet

Yury Avrutin began his serious contact with digital computing hardware in mid-seventies by hand-soldering an IMSAI-8080 and then moving onto a PDP-8 with 4k of torroidal core memory. Over the years he has worked on diverse proprietary hardware and machines running operating systems ranging from Unix, VAX, Interdata, Honeywell to CP/M and, of course, the ubiquitous MS-DOS. He is well versed in internetworking, high-order languages such as Perl, C, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, PL/M, Atlas and a host of assembly and obscure machine languages represented by PAL-8, Macro11, ATAC16, GI-66, SABR.

For the last fifteen years Mr. Avrutin formed and headed companies specializing in international marketing, multi-lingual technical translations and U.S. Government contracting. Mr. Avrutin was in the forefront of entry into the Russian market by the U.S. interests before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union, acting as an advisor to the U.S. Government and U.S. corporations. Prior to founding his own enterprises, Mr. Avrutin designed avionics for U.S. Fortune 100 companies, among them ITT, Honeywell, General Instrument, Westinghouse, Grumman and Allied-Signal.

Mr. Avrutin is a co-founder and Chief Financial Officer of Global Business Alliances, LLC, an organization assisting commercial entities in the U.S. and Russia in expanding their presence in the respective foreign markets. In addition, Mr. Avrutin is a Joint Venture partner in Cyrillic Films and Cyrillic Films Music, importers of Russian film and animation. Mr. Avrutin has also served on the board of directors of Marathon Sports Group, Inc., producers of sports radio and TV talk shows.

Yury Avrutin emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1974. He is an alumnus of the City College of New York with a Bachelor's of Science in Physics. Mr. Avrutin is a teacher of Iaido, a Japanese art of swordsmanship, a competition aerobatics pilot, holds an FAA commercial pilot's license and an FCC advanced amateur radio license. Mr. Avrutin is an author of five novels and numerous short stories some of which he hopes to publish shortly. When not flying his airplane between East and West Coasts, Mr. Avrutin writes prose in New York City.