LabVIEW and Max reached the same patch-cord visual-dataflow metaphor within about a year, on the Macintosh, from unrelated fields

Two visual programming environments born in the mid-1980s made the wiring diagram the program itself — nodes connected by "patch cords," data flowing along the wires — and did so for entirely unrelated purposes. Miller Puckette began "The Patcher" (later Max, then Max/MSP) in 1985 at IRCAM in Paris, a graphical patching environment for computer-music composition; it reached market via Opcode in 1990. Jeff Kodosky and James Truchard shipped LabVIEW through National Instruments in 1986, a graphical environment for scientific test-and-measurement automation that coined the phrase "virtual instrumentation." Both exploited the early Macintosh's graphics to turn a dataflow diagram into executable code.

The reported convergence is striking because the two fields — avant-garde music composition and engineering instrument control — had no obvious contact, yet landed on the same paradigm within roughly a year on the same new platform. Whether the convergence was genuinely independent is the open question: a shared academic ancestor exists in Jack Dennis's MIT dataflow-computation research (from the late 1960s), and no direct citation from either Puckette or Kodosky to Dennis — or to each other — has been confirmed. See question-verify-labview-max-dataflow-convergence-independence.

The Max side of this pair closes a loop with the Bell Labs computer-music lineage: the language is named after Max Mathews, whose 1961 "Daisy Bell" demo later became HAL 9000's death song.