History

Early-1990s: Christina Engelbart and Bob Czech decide to make addresses purple in the graphical Augment client, written in Smalltalk.

Late-1990s: Doug Engelbart suggests adding Augment's structural statement numbers to HTML documents in order to make them granularly addressable. Following the convention of the Smalltalk client, he suggests that they be colored purple.

January 31, 2001: I introduce Purple, a system for automatically adding, maintaining, and displaying purple numbers on XML documents. In addition to structural statement numbers, Purple supports Augment statement IDs.

April 24, 2001: Murray Altheim releases plink, a system for adding and maintaining purple numbers on XHTML documents. He also coins the verb, "to plink."