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WELCOME Louis T. Rader University of Virginia Good morning. My name is Louis Rader. I want to welcome you to this symposium on behalf of the National Research Council. This is one of a series of public forums run by the Board on Telecommunications -Computer Applications of the National Research Council. On Boards such as these, we have volunteers from industry, from academia, from non-profit organizations who work to help the federal government do a better job of applying technology. For example, we currently have three areas in which we are working: with the Internal Revenue Service to modernize its tax processing system, and I might say parenthetically that most people in the country are not in favor of helping them but they are still our tax dollars. We are working with the Postal Service on plans for electronic mail. We are working with the Air Force to improve their worldwide computerized administrative support system. Now, this Symposium on Integrated Computer-Based Office Systems is supported through the good offices of the National Bureau of Standards who supplied the necessary funds, although we did the planning. Jim Burroughs, who is director of the Institute for Computer Science and Technology of the National Bureau, will be with us this afternoon. To start the Symposium this morning I would like to turn the meeting over to Dr. Licklider, a very unusual professor who is professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the Deputy Chairman of our Board and he is the Symposium Chairman. For those of you who worry about whether we will quit at five o'clock, Dr. Licklider is willing to take wagers at a dollar a minute, so that I think you can be quite sure that even though he is a professor, that this meeting will end on time. So, we turn it over to Dr. Licklider.
