Purple was written by Chris Dent and Eugene Eric Kim.

Purple Numbers are a direct descendant of the "statement identifiers"
in the original hypertext system, Doug Engelbart's NLS/Augment.
Engelbart was the first to suggest publishing these numbers in HTML
documents.  His daughter, Christina, suggested making them purple.

Eugene Eric Kim wrote the first tools for automatically generating and
maintaining purple numbers in documents.

  http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/

Kim and Chris Dent continued to build on this idea in PurpleWiki.
Dent wrote the original transclusion code in PurpleWiki, and Dent and
Gerry Gleason wrote most of the code for handling purple numbers.

  http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/

Our starting point for this code was Matthew O'Connor's post to the
PurpleWiki development list on October 12, 2005:

  http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/forums/devel/2005-10/msg00024.html

Kim would like to thank the good folks at El Sombrero in Seattle for
putting up with Kim and Dent for several hours while they coded away.
This code would not have been possible without the aid of their
special macho margaritas.

Many more folks have contributed to the evolution of Purple Numbers.
For more on this sordid and exciting tale, see:

  http://purple.blueoxen.net/