Brian Reid

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Brian Keith Reid (born 1949) is a computer scientist most famous for developing the Scribe word processing system, the subject of his 1980 doctoral dissertation, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982. Scribe was a pioneer in the use of descriptive markup. Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented GML, the immediate predecessor of SGML. Reid's other principal interest has been networking and the development of the Internet.

Reid received his B.A. from the University of Maryland and then worked in industry for some years before entering graduate school at Carnegie-Mellon University. From 1981-1986 he was a faculty member in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. During this period he and colleagues built the first Cisco router and founded Adobe Systems. Denied tenure, he was immediately hired by the Digital Equipment Corporation where he eventually became director of the Network Systems Laboratory. His laboratory created the first firewall in 1987 and the first high-powered internet search engine, AltaVista, in 1991. In 1987, he and John Gilmore created the alt. hierarchy on usenet.

In 1999 he moved to Bell Labs' Silicon Valley site. When this laboratory was closed in 2002 he became Director of Operations at Google. He was fired in February 2004, nine days before Google's IPO, allegedly costing him US$38 million in stock options. Reid sued Google unsuccessfully for age discrimination.

Reid is a practicing Anglican and a member of the Society of Archbishop Justus.