The paper outlines the history of a standard architecture for small and medium sized administrative systems. It has been developped 1985 in the Schering AG / Berlin, and applied in several firms over more than 15 years. Some of the about 150 applications, developped and maintained by more than 100 programmers, are still in operation. In 1999 a revision of the architecture and a new implementation in JAVA was started. The latest version is a four-level-architecture for distributed systems with a browser as user interface. Aside architectural considerations we discuss some of our design and implementation experiences with JAVA.