  The Ford-Kac-Mazur formalism is used to study quantum transport in (1)
electronic and (2) harmonic oscillator systems connected to general reservoirs.
It is shown that for non-interacting systems the method is easy to implement
and is used to obtain many exact results on electrical and thermal transport in
one-dimensional disordered wires. Some of these have earlier been obtained
using nonequilibrium Green function methods. We examine the role that
reservoirs and contacts can have on determining the transport properties of a
wire and find several interesting effects.
