Boris Khalif

A Tiny, Rapt Audience
Boris Khalif moved to the United States from Ukraine at the age of 10, loved computers and devoured everything he could find about them. When he got his first computer in high school, he took it apart and then put it back together. At first it did not work, so he kept fiddling until it did. Friends and relatives brought their computer problems to him and he fixed them. Mr. Khalif, 30, who lived in Brooklyn, was working as a computer consultant at Marsh & McLennan in 1 World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Although his son, Steven, was still only 2, Mr. Khalif had already begun to buy him children's games for the computer. But Steven was fascinated watching Mr. Khalif play his own computer games. "War games, fighting, monsters, our son liked to watch them all," said Mr. Khalif's wife, Ella. "That's how I fed my son. He was too busy watching what my husband was doing to feed himself."