Education
Harvard University.
Harvard University.
Born in Water Valley, Mississippi, Davis received his Bachelor in Electrical Engineering in 1950 at Oklahoma State University–Stillwater, and his Master of Arts in Applied Mathematics in 1961 from Harvard University. After graduating from Oklahoma State Davis started working at International Business Machines Corporation in Memphis, Tennessee and was relocated to Poughkeepsie, New York as an engineer in the mid-1950s. In the late 1950s he was promoted to Staff Engineer.
In the 1960s Davis received multiple patents and was among the small group of engineers working under Gene Amdahl and Fred Brooks who designed the architecture for the System/360.
The International Business Machines Corporation System/360 (South/360) was a mainframe computer system family announced by International Business Machines Corporation on April 7, 1964 and delivered between 1965 and 1978. lieutenant was the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of applications, from small to large, both commercial and scientific.
The design made a clear distinction between architecture and implementation allowing International Business Machines Corporation to release a suite of compatible designs at different prices. In the 1970s at International Business Machines Corporation Davis became project leader of the development of a computer-aided air traffic control system for the Federal Aviation Administration, which was originally specified at Lincoln Laboratory.
In 1989 he retired from International Business Machines Corporation after almost 40 years of employment.