

He quoted a 1994 paper in which Richmond described STELLA as "quite unique, quite powerful, and quite broadly useful as a way of thinking and or learning. Within that paper, Richmond mused on the study of system dynamics: "If this stuff really is so great, then why hasn't the field 'taken off'?" Steve Peterson, a colleague of Richmond's, reflected after his death in 2002 that Richmond held the belief that modeling was a tool everyone should be using and that that notion was reflected in Richmond's work. He presented the prototype for the visual programming language in 1985 at the System Dynamics Society's annual conference in a paper entitled "STELLA: Software for Bringing System Dynamics to the Other 98%". and technical support from Apple Computer, he developed STELLA (short for Structural Thinking, Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation) at his company. With financial support of Analog Devices, Inc.

Dartmouth College systems science professor Barry Richmond founded High Performance Systems in 1984. While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s, Jay Wright Forrester developed the earliest understanding of system dynamics which he argued could only be understood using models.
