He was part of the team that built the MADDIDA, guidance system for Northrop's Snark cruise missile – one of the first digital computers.
He developed and introduced the now-standard Register Transfer Language to the computer community while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.
[5] The University of Southern California graduate school of electrical engineering required doctoral students to pass an oral screening exam, in which there were eight categories of test questions.
While a student in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, Reed did not complete his required physical education courses due to time pressure and was set to enter the Navy.
Reed and colleagues demonstrated the MADDIDA computer to John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.