This paper provides an account of the project TEMPORA, run from 1989 to 1994 and sponsored by the European Union, in which the Swedish Institute for Systems Development (SISU) and the research institute SINTEF from Norway were two of the partners. The project aimed at developing a prototypical systems development environment that involved the time dimension and it was based on the explicit representation of business rules. The Nordic partners played important roles in the project, in designing, building, and evaluating modeling formalisms and tools, as well as in designing methodological support.