21 years ago it was a joint idea with Hans Rottenkolber to organize a workshop dedicated to the discussion of the latest results in the automatic processing of fringe patterns. This idea was promoted by the insight that automatic and high precision phase measurement techniques will play a key role in all future industrial and scientific applications of optical metrology. A couple of months later more than 50 specialists from East and West met in East Berlin, the capital of the former GDR, to spend 3 days with the discussion of new principles of fringe processing. In the stimulating atmoshere the idea was born to repeat the workshop and to organize the meeting in an olympic schedule. And thus meanwhile 20 years have been passed and we have today Fringe number six. However, such a workshop takes place in a dynamic environment. Therefore the main topics of the previous events were always adapted to the most interesting subjects of the new period. In 1993 the workshop took place in Bremen and was dedicated to new principles of optical shape measurement, setup calibration, phase unwrapping and nondestructive testing, while in 1997 new approaches in multi-sensor metrology, active measurement strategies and hybrid processing technologies played a central role. 2001, the first meeting in the 21st century, was focused to optical methods for micromeasurements, hybrid measurement technologies and new sensor solutions for industrial inspection.