Who Is Brian Reid?

Brian Keith Reid was an American computer scientist renowned for his pioneering work in document processing and early internet infrastructure. He earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, where he developed the Scribe markup language and word processing system. Scribe was revolutionary for its time, introducing the concept of separating document content from its presentation, a principle that profoundly influenced later systems like LaTeX and SGML/HTML. Reid later worked at Stanford University and then Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory (DEC WRL) in Palo Alto. At DEC, he was involved in networking and also played a significant, though controversial, role in the 'Great Renaming' of Usenet newsgroups and the creation of the alt.* hierarchy, which allowed for a more diverse and less centrally controlled range of discussion topics. He also worked for Google as Director of Operations for a period. His contributions earned him the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982.

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