Reid McRae Watts

From 1997 through 1999 Reid was the Research and Advanced Technology Vice President for NCR. His assignment included leadership of the Privacy and Innovation themes within NCR, the leadership of the NCR's Technology Council, management of NCR's technology strategy, management of NCR research partner relations with Bell Labs, MCC, and universities, funding NCR's advanced technology projects, and participation on NCR's mergers and acquisitions team.  Reid also served as a member of the board of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), and led the creation of the International Security and Privacy Alliance where he served as board member and President. 

In 1996, Reid was the Networking and Security Strategy Vice President of NCR, and was responsible for setting the basic networking and security technical direction for all NCR product and service business units, as well as managing the NCR strategies and positions with respect to standards organizations, government relations, technology partnerships, technical competencies, advanced development projects, and pilots. 

From 1994 through 1996 Reid headed NCR's Comten business unit in St. Paul, MN. In that capacity, Reid succeeded at returning a mature product  business unit to profitability and then converting the business into a profitable services business.  Under Reid's management, the Comten product line was the most profitable product line in NCR.

Reid's career began at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland in 1970 and 1971 as a summer intern where he wrote some of the first applications for IBM's then experimental APL timesharing system.

He joined AT&T Bell Labs in Naperville, IL in 1976 as a Member of Technical Staff.  Within a year he was the project leader of the Bell Labs Network development, which was the first portable implementation of a seven-layer network architecture, similar to the one later standardized by the International Standards Organization as the Open Systems Interconnect  (OSI) model.  In 1980, Reid was promoted to Supervisor in Bell Labs.  In that capacity he worked closely with Bell Labs Research to bring about a large internal pilot of Datakit, the first switched virtual circuit data network and predecessor to what is know today as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).  During the same time period, he also led the implementation and internal deployment of the largest distributed electronic mail system (POST) as well as the deployment of an innovative distributed bulletin board system (NETNEWS).  POST evolved into AT&Tmail, and NETNEWS evolved into the "newsgroups" of today's Internet.

In  1984, Reid was appointed Head of the Networking and Computing Technology Department in Bell Labs.  In that capacity, he led the introduction of TCP/IP as the Bell Labs corporate backbone network, making it one of the first large "Intranets" to be deployed, complete with the first "Firewall".  Due to Reid's security strategy that was based on Firewall technology from Bell Labs Research, AT&T was unaffected by Internet viruses that brought down many other Internet-connected networks in the late 1980s.   In the computing technology area, Reid led the conversion of the Bell Labs technical computing environment from a timesharing/mainframe based environment to a distributed all-UNIX environment.  As a result, Bell Labs was the first large corporation to implement an all-UNIX technical computing environment, demonstrating for the first time that was possible to run the same operating system with full portability on everything from microcomputers to mainframes to supercomputers. In April, 1993, Reid was appointed Director of Engineering of the Comten Business Unit of NCR (then AT&T Global Information Solutions).