[2] In 1958, at age 15, Ellis applied for a job as a graveyard shift computer operator at the manufacturing firm Dover to earn money to help his family.
[citation needed] In Ellis' junior year, Beloit College received an IBM 1620 as a donation,[4] and he and his chemistry professor were asked to set it up.
He eventually attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he worked on hardware, software, and applications of the ILLIAC IV supercomputer.
In 1972 he became an assistant professor and a founding member of the computer science department at the University of Colorado Boulder to work on operating systems research.
[citation needed] Ellis accepted a position three years later as an assistant professor in EECS at MIT to work on research related to ARPANET.
[citation needed] In the early 1990s, Ellis left MCC to become the Chief Architect of the FlowPath workflow product of Bull S.A. in France.
[citation needed] In 1992, Ellis returned to the University of Colorado Boulder as full professor with tenure in the computer science department.
In 2009, he became an emeritus professor at the university, where he insisted on periodically teaching an introductory computing course to "encourage students of all ethnicities to expand their horizons.
"[6] To provide further opportunities for students to pursue science and engineering, Ellis "helped establish the 10-week Summer Multicultural Access to Research Training (SMART) program at the university.
"[6] In 2013, Ellis won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach and perform research in the computer science department at Ashesi University.