When Phillip Thompson began to write the first widely read textbook on numerical weather prediction (NWP), the subject was in its infancy, even though an earlier book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process by L. F. Richardson (1922), presaged what was to come later in the century after the advent of electronic computers. The availability of computers increased greatly in the 1960s, and universities began to offer courses in atmospheric modeling, but most modelers had to also be model developers because the untested codes had many errors, the numerical schemes for solving the equations and the physical-process representations were not well tested and understood, lateralboundary conditions for limited-area models produced noisy solutions, and codes for defining the initial conditions needed to be further developed. These early practitioners learned the basics of atmospheric modeling from each other, through journal articles, in seminars and conferences, and from early courses on the subject. During the last 30 years of the twentieth century, graduate-level courses in atmospheric modeling flourished at many universities. And because computer modeling of the atmosphere was increasingly becoming an important tool in research and operational weather prediction, these courses were typically filled. Nevertheless, atmospheric modeling was still somewhat of a specialty, and models were not very accessible beyond national centers and a few research universities. Smagorinsky (1983), Thompson (1983), Shuman (1989), Persson (2005), Lynch (2007), and Harper (2008) should be consulted for additional history on atmospheric modeling.