[5] He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics, then an M.S.
Griswold went to Bell Labs in 1962, where he studied ideas for non-numerical computation.
In 1971, he was hired by the University of Arizona to be its first professor of computer science, subsequently organized the department, and was its head until 1981.
The earlier Ratfor implementation of Icon was discarded and the language rewritten from scratch in C and UNIX.
"As one of the founders of the Bell Labs software culture that spawned UNIX, C, and many other essential contributions to modern software, Ralph Griswold brought to his academic research not only brilliance, but also experience and a value system that demanded that research ideas be tested by fire and proven useful and usable by real users, not just good-looking diagrams in academic papers.