Rand Symposium.

The day before the Western Joint Computer Conference a number of experts representing all facets of the profession met at the Rand Corporation to discuss current topics in computing. Each year an attempt was made to gather a homogenous group of experts for the one-day invitational symposium. The Rand Corporation sponsored the symposia through 1968. California State University, Northridge assumed responsibility for the symposia from 1969 until 1976.

The group, feeling the symposia had outlived their usefulness, decided to discontinue them after 1976. The final four symposia were thematically centered. The fifteenth symposium focused on exploring the future. The sixteenth symposium evaluated the future of programmers. The seventeenth symposium examined the problems of the AFIPS societies.

The eighteenth symposium looked ahead to the next thirty years of computing.