He grew up as an only child, later with a half-brother George nearly 20 years his junior who was born in 1943 after Patrick had entered the army.
In his third year, at the insistence of his family, Suppes attended the University of Tulsa, majoring in physics, before entering the Army Reserves in 1942.
In the 1960s Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson (the future president of the University of California) conducted experiments in using computers to teach math and reading to school children in the Palo Alto area.
[5] At Stanford, Suppes was instrumental in encouraging the development of high-technology companies that were springing up in the field of educational software up into the 1990s, (such as Bien Logic).
Seeded by a research grant in 1964 from the U.S. Department of Education to the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, the IBM 1500 CAI system was initially prototyped at the Brentwood Elementary School (Ravenswood City School District) in East Palo Alto, California by Suppes.
Such commentators as Kirk Ludwig trace the origins of Davidson's theory of radical interpretation to his formative work with Suppes.