The results of Iv. Prodanov on abstract spectra and separative algebras were announced in the journal Trudy Mat. Inst. Steklova, 154, 1983, 200--208, but their proofs were never written by him in the form of a manuscript, preprint or paper. Since the
untimely death of Ivan Prodanov withheld him from preparing the full version of this paper and since, in our opinion, it contains interesting and important results, we undertook the task of writing a full version of it and thus making the results from it known to the mathematical community. So, the aim of this paper is to supply with proofs the results of Ivan Prodanov announced in the cited above paper, but we added also a small amount of new results. The full responsibility for the correctness of the proofs of the assertions presented below in this work is taken by us; just for this reason our names appear as authors of the present paper.
We generalize a theorem of E. Michael and M. E. Rudin and a theorem of D. Preiss and P. Simon; we give, as well, some partial answers to a recent question of A. V. Arhangelskiv{i}.
