Peter C. Patton has been involved in computing since his student days at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, where he learned to program the Mark I in 1955, and the Mark IV and Univac I in 1956. After he received his AB degree in Engineering and Applied Physics, his first job in computing was at Boeing-Wichita in 1957. He set up the first computing center at the University of Kansas in 1958, and completed an MA degree in mathematics there in 1959. He worked in the Systems Engineering Group at Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City until he came to St Paul, MN in 1961 as principal programmer at Univac. In 1962, he was appointed scientific consultant for Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Univac International. He finished his Dr.-Ing. degree at Stuttgart, where he was Leiter der Rechengruppe from 1964 until returning to the US in 1966 as manager of system design at Univac. His group worked on the 1108 multiprocessor and its follow-on systems. In 1969, he joined the software industry startup as general manager of Analysts International Corp. in Minneapolis. In 1971, he joined the University of Minnesota as Director of the Computer Center and Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, and of Computer Science. Long interested in the application of computing and aerospace technology to the study of antiquity, he also joined the Center for Ancient Studies at the university in 1974 and became its director in 1978. In 1981, the computer center was the first at a university to install a Cray I, and, in 1985, received a new Cray II. He took leave of the university to set up the parallel processing architecture group at MCC in Austin, Texas in 1984, but returned as founding director of the Minnesota Supercomputer Center in 1985.

He left the university to start a consulting firm for commercial parallel processing applications in 1987, but spent most of the next four years consulting for NASA on supercomputing and parallel processing. In 1990, he was assigned by NASA to start up the National Transfer Technology Center at Wheeling Jesuit University. In 1991, he was appointed Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he led the development of a new information architecture and client server systems for both administration and research based on three IBM SP-2 parallel processors. Patton joined Lawson Software in St. Paul as Chief Technologist with the goals of getting Lawson Unix-based business applications software on the Internet, its server-side running on parallel processors, and everything converted to Java. He left Lawson in 2002 to join St. Thomas University in St. Paul as a Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science. He teaches computer architecture, business applications development in COBOL, and scientific applications development in Java.

Patton is author or co-author of 17 books, book chapters, or monographs, and 67 technical contributions. He also holds three patents on automatic software generation. He especially enjoys computer applications to ancient languages and literature.