| Sumario: | The 80th Tübingen Colloquium, itself betokening an achievement of continuity worth celebrating, also marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of the section for Literary and Documentary Data Processing within the Tübingen Computing Centre. Harold Short, Director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, gave the main address, entitled ‘The Role of Humanities Computing: Experiences and Challenges.’ Wilhelm Ott, head of the team for Literary and Documentary Data Processing since its inception, gave an account of its history, its concepts, its organisation, and its perspectives. Wilhelm Ott's own early pragmatic concern for non-numerical computing - triggered as it was by his work on hexameter analysis - coalesced with the foresight of the Tübingen Computer Centre appreciating early the future potential of humanities computing. The section for Literary and Documentary Data Processing, conceived in an interdisciplinary service function, and nurtured by that interdisciplinarity, provided the developmental platform for TUSTEP. Its corner stones were the typesetting, updating and collation programmes, the software-independent solutions for character coding, and the foundational routines for lexical lemmatization. The decisive integrative solution to the over-all concept of TUSTEP was its modular design - recognised even today as future-oriented - combined with a task orientation that has made it, for the advanced and trained user, a script language adaptable to a vast range of humanities computing problems. Its proved flexibility and durability, combined today with, for example, its easy compatibility with XML/TEI precepts and procedures, secures its undiminished validity. The University of Tübingen recognises the asset it holds in TUSTEP and edeavours to vouchsafe its institutional future beyond the retirement of Wilhelm Ott in 2003.
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