He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1969, and a Ph.D. in computer science under Bob Barton at Utah in 1972.

[1] With Bob Barton, in cooperation between Burroughs Corporation and Utah, Davis built the first operational dataflow or "data driven" computing machine, the DDM-1, between 1972 and 1976.

[2] In the early 1980s, Davis left his tenured professor position at Utah to work for Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, where he headed the computer architecture group and developed the "FAIM-1" architecture.

[3] In 1988 he joined Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, where with Ken Stevens and Bill Coates he developed the "post office" switching architecture, a widely cited project.

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