David A. Patterson was the first in his family to graduate from college (1969 A.B UCLA), and he enjoyed it so much that he didn't stop until a PhD, (1976 UCLA). After 4 years developing a wafer-scale computer at Hughes Aircraft, he joined U.C. Berkeley in 1977. He spent 1979 at DEC working on the VAX minicomputer. He and colleagues later developed the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). By joining forces with IBM's 801 and Stanford's MIPS projects, RISC became widespread. In 1984 Sun Microsystems recruited him to start the SPARC architecture. In 1987, Patterson and colleagues wondered if tried building dependable storage systems from the new PC disks. This led to the popular Redundant… Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). He spent 1989 working on the CM-5 supercomputer. Patterson and colleagues later tried building a supercomputer using standard desktop computers and switches. The resulting Network of Workstations (NOW) project led to cluster technology used by many startups. He is now working on the Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) project. In the past, he served as Chair of Berkeley's CS Division, Chair and CRA. He is currently serving on the IT advisory committee to the U.S. President and has just been elected President of the ACM. All this resulted in 150 papers, 5 books, and the following honors, some shared with friends: election to the National Academy of Engineering; from the University of California: Outstanding Alumnus Award (UCLA Computer Science Department), McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching (Berkeley Computer Science), Distinguished Teaching Award (Berkeley); from ACM: fellow, SIGMOD Test of Time Award, Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award; from IEEE: fellow, Johnson Information Storage Award, Undergraduate Teaching Award, Mulligan Education Medal, and von Neumann Medal.