I first met Michael Sperberg-McQueen in November 1987 at the TEI planning conference at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie in November 1987.

Since then, we have enjoyed a regular and fruitful exchange, not only at the ALLC/ACH and DH conferences or XML Prague: during his visits to Germany, he was sometimes also a guest in our house.

Between 1995 and 1999 alone, we organized four TEI workshops at the University of Tübingen, which he co-organized and which contributed significantly to the University of Tübingen becoming a center for Digital Humanities - or its predecessor, as the name had not yet been coined.

In the third of these workshops in February 1997, Michael had the big innovation in his luggage: XML was being developed and would soon replace SGML: simpler, clearer, more intuitive. It was this workshop and the work around the workshop that led us to systematically focus the further development of TUSTEP on supporting XML as early as 1997.

It was a great honor for me that Michael gave the laudatory speech in Urbana 10 years later when I received the Busa Award. Even then, we could look back on 20 years of working together on tools for the digital humanities. Another 10 years later, in his keynote speech in Potsdam on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the International TUSTEP User Group, he said that also his "partial knowledge of TUSTEP" had influenced his "work on infrastructures for the digital humanities and other scholarly fields".

Dear Michael: You have enriched my work professionally like few other people. I look back with gratitude on over 30 years of collaboration. You leave a big gap.

Wilhelm Ott, University of Tübingen / Germany