It’s every time astonishing when you recap the period between the first room-sized data processing centres and the pocket-sized portable devices of today. Everyone who has worked with IT over a longer period has used a system, which no longer exists. This death of the systems has the effect, that our digital cultural heritage is only readable and usable for a narrow period of time. When the associated system disappears the data will become useless and is not utilizable for research and for the future.

The European project KEEP is dedicated to this particular problem. They try to find solutions of long duration by the development of migration strategies and emulation software. Migration is asoftware-sided way, where the old data is converted into a data language which is readable for modern systems. Emulation on the other hand is the solution on the hardware level by ...