It formed the subject of his 1980 doctoral dissertation, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982.
[8] Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date.
To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.
[9] Stallman's Texinfo is "loosely based on Brian Reid's Scribe and other formatting languages of the time"[citation needed].
The FinalWord word processor from Mark of the Unicorn, which became Borland's Sprint, featured a markup language which resembled a simplified version of Scribe's.