William Ford completed his undergraduate degree at MIT, having majored in mathematics and minored in electrical engineering. He went on to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with his thesis paper entitled "Numerical Solution of Pseudo-parabolic Partial Differential Equations," and after two years of researching and teaching within the Department of Mathematics at Clemson University he joined the faculty of the Mathematics Department at the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California. Here he went on to become a founding member of the Department of the Computer Science. Beginning in the 1980s, he and William Topp began jointly publishing books, that included a Motorola 68000 assembly language book through D.C. Heath, a book on data structures with C++ through Prentice Hall, and a book on data structures with Java through Prentice Hall. Dr. Ford additionally developed an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) named "EZJava" to accompany the Java book and served as the Chair of the Computer Science Department until his retirement in 2014.