Keynote address

Abstract

My purpose here at this conference is to provide a background, first for meetings like this on subjects dealing with computers, and second, for this particular meeting. My qualifications for keynoting are, I think, as good as those of anyone here: as far as this particular meeting is concerned, I am not now directly engaged in working on computers of the type that we are going to discuss; and the organization that I represent, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, is not in the business of making such computers. So I speak as a relatively innocent bystander.