William Ford was born December 25, 1944 in the then Phelps Dodge copper mining town of Ajo, Arizona. After a time, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where Bill finished grade school and attended Phoenix Central High School, graduating sixth in his class in 1963. He was fortunate to be admitted to MIT where he majored in mathematics and minored in electrical engineering. After graduating with the class of 1967, he became a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, receiving the Ph.D. in 1972. His thesis advisor was Dr. Tsuan Wu Ting, and the thesis was entitled "Numerical Solution of Pseudo-parabolic Partial Differential Equations". After spending two years teaching and doing research in the Department of Mathematics at Clemson University, he took a position in the Mathematics Department at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. He became a founding member of the Department of the Computer Science Department at Pacific in the mid-eighties. In 1988, William Topp and he published a Motorola 68000 assembly language book with D.C. Heath, with a second edition in 1992. Along with the book, they produced and sold an IDE for the 68000. In 1996, William Topp and he published a data structures book using C++ with Prentice Hall and a second edition in 2001. They also published a C++ CS1 text and a data structures book using Java. Bill developed an IDE named "EZJava" to accompany the latter book. Dr. Ford served as Chair of the Computer Science Department for eleven years and retired May, 2014 after forty years at the University of the Pacific. In September 2014 his book entitled "Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications using MATLAB" was published by Elsevier/Academic Press.