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.
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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.S. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park,[1] and then worked in industry for five years before entering graduate school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he was awarded a PhD in Computer Science in 1980.
From 1980–1987, he was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. Denied tenure, he was immediately hired by the Digital Equipment Corporation where he eventually became director of the Network Systems Laboratory. He experimented with electronic publishing with his USENET Cookbook project. 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. He also created and ran the "USENET readership report", which sampled the reading habits of volunteer news readers, tried to extrapolate them across the entire population of the USENET, and reported them monthly to the news.lists newsgroup.
In 1999, he moved to Bell Labs' Silicon Valley site. In February 2001, he left and taught at Carnegie Mellon University.
In June 2002,[1] Reid became Director of Operations at Google. He was fired in February 2004, nine days before the company's IPO was announced, allegedly costing him 119,000 stock options with a strike price of $0.30,[2] which would have been worth approximately $10 million at the $85 IPO price.
After retaining Duane Morris as counsel, Reid proceeded to sue Google for discrimination on the basis of age and disability. He was 52 years old and had been diagnosed as having diabetes while at Google.[2] Google retained Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which defended the case on the grounds that Reid was allegedly not a cultural fit.[3] In September 2005, the Santa Clara Superior Court initially granted summary judgment against him.[4] On October 4, 2007, the California Sixth District Court of Appeal overturned the lower court's verdict and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.[5] Google appealed that decision to the California Supreme Court,[6] which granted review in February 2008.[7]
The Court granted review to decide two questions, one substantive and one procedural: (1) should an employee be allowed to sue an employer for hostile "stray remarks" by employees who were not directly involved in the allegedly discriminatory decision at issue; and (2) are specific objections to evidence at the summary judgment stage waived when the trial court fails to rule on specific objections despite oral requests that the trial court do so. The parties thoroughly briefed the issues on the merits; next, the Court sat on the case for more than a year; then asked for further supplemental briefing from the parties in April 2010 on the procedural question; and finally scheduled oral argument for May 26, 2010. On August 5, 2010, in an opinion by Justice Ming Chin, the Court affirmed the Court of Appeal decision in favor of Reid and remanded to the lower courts for further proceedings. The Court refused to adopt the "stray remarks" doctrine pioneered by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, because remarks by non-decisionmakers may be circumstantial evidence relevant to discriminatory actions (in the sense that hostile co-workers can manipulate a supervisor as a cat's paw); and written objections to evidence are preserved for appeal regardless of whether the trial court rules upon them or whether counsel even argues them orally before the court. In other words, Google won on the procedural question, but Reid won on the substantive question, meaning that he will be able to introduce a much broader range of evidence of Google's alleged atmosphere of discrimination to the trier of fact.
Since July 2005, Reid has worked at the Internet Systems Consortium, where he holds the post of staff scientist.[1]
Reid is an active photographer and has sponsored the Leica User's Group, an e-mail discussion list, for almost two decades.
Reid is a practicing Anglican and a member of the Society of Archbishop Justus. He is an editor of Anglicans Online.[8]