The German Research Council (DFG) decided 1987 to establish a nationwide five year research project devoted to dynamics of multibody systems. In this project universities and research centers cooperated with the goal to develop a general pur- pose multibody system software package. This concept provides the opportunity to use a modular structure of the software, i.e. different multibody formalisms may be combined with different simulation programmes via standardized interfaces. For the DFG project the database RSYST was chosen using standard FORTRAN 77 and an object oriented multibody system...