Known for developing the Scribe word processing system and pioneering the use of descriptive markup, Reid earned his B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, 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 joined Stanford University as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Denied tenure, Reid 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. Reid 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.
