Programs for Ever Programs for Ever

This article reflects our experience with the preservation of computer programs that once served a scientific purpose, but were not maintained since then. After producing results, published in scientific journals in the 70’s, 80’s and begin 90’s, they were stored provisionally on some kind of persistent medium and are at present restored to current state of the art hardware. We constructed an architecture for a digital library in which, beside other products of our ”digital inheritance”, also programs and their data input and sometimes output can be archived for the long term. This is achieved by dividing rigorously content, representation and presentation of programs, together with their inand output. Vital in this concept is the distinction -defined in an XML based environmentbetween documents and (their) viewers. We focus on programs from the physics community. However these principles can be applied for other disciples as well e.g. social sciences with their questionnaires as input and their analysing programs, producing statistical output.