Brian Reid (computer scientist)

Brian Keith Reid (born 1949) is an American computer scientist. He developed an early use of a markup language in his 1980 doctoral dissertation. His other principal interest has been computer networking and the development of the Internet.

Reid received his B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1970, 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.

His dissertation research developed the Scribe word processing system, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982. Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented Generalized Markup Language (GML), the immediate predecessor of SGML.

From 1980–1987, he was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University in the computer systems laboratory. There he was a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, working along with other new faculty such as John L. Hennessy, David R. Cheriton, and Mark Horowitz. Along with faculty such as Susan Owicki, Forest Baskett, and James H. Clark, his research concerned the connection of Stanford to the Internet, and the development of the SUN workstation. As the Stanford University Network attracted attacks, he became interested in possible network defenses.

He left Stanford in 1987, he was immediately hired by the Digital Equipment Corporation, first in the Western Research Laboratory (DEC WRL) under Forest Baskett in Palo Alto, California. Reid and Paul Vixie developed one of the first connections between a corporate network and the Internet, known as "Gatekeeper" after the character in the Ghostbusters film. The protection techniques developed evolved into what is now called a network firewall. Some early Internet attackers (such as Kevin Mitnick) would impersonate Reid in telephone calls in attempts to gain trust.

He experimented with electronic publishing with his USENET Cookbook project. 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.

From 1986 thru 1995, Reid produced a variety of maps of the USENET in PostScript, showing both its geographical reach and its volumes of traffic flow.

In 1995 he became director of his own group, the Network Systems Laboratory (DEC NSL). The DEC NSL developed one of the largest Internet exchange points as the Internet became available for commercial use in the 1990s. One of his employees was Anita Borg, who founded the group Systers and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing while at NSL. DEC NSL and WRL developed AltaVista, one of the first web search engines. In 1998, he was invited to give a keynote talk at the Markup Technologies conference, discussing 20 years of history in the technology.