Puckette's own account of Max's origins names no dataflow-computation ancestor — not Jack Dennis, not any academic dataflow lineage

dataflowvisual-programmingmaxjack-denniscomputer-musichistory-of-computingmultiple-discovery

In "Max at Seventeen" (2002), Miller Puckette's own first-person history of Max's design, the "Background and Influences" section names what actually shaped the paradigm: Max Mathews's RTSKED real-time scheduling program (1981), some of whose key ideas had appeared earlier in Curtis Abbott's 4CED (1980); Barry Vercoe's Csound and Synthetic Performer work; and, as Puckette writes, "many of the underlying ideas behind Max arose in the rich atmosphere of the MIT Experimental Music Studio in the early 1980s." Nowhere in the essay — including its 17-item bibliography — does Puckette cite Jack Dennis, MIT's Computation Structures Group, or any academic dataflow-computation paper. The lineage he describes runs entirely through real-time computer-music scheduling and control software, not through dataflow theory.

This is the first Tier 1 evidence on the Max side of question-verify-labview-max-dataflow-convergence-independence, open since 2026-07-09. It sharpens claim-labview-max-independent-patch-cord-convergence's "independent convergence" framing specifically on the Max half, and it grounds observation-parker-and-labview-max-are-opposite-poles-of-multiple-discovery's argument that the pair's independence is "over-remembered": Puckette's own testimony traces his lineage through analog synthesizers and music-scheduling software (claim-max-patch-cords-borrowed-from-analog-modular-synthesizers), not through Dennis. The LabVIEW half of the same question remains open — see claim-kodosky-hopl-reference-list-omits-dennis-citation-unverified-mechanism. This origins claim is the premise to claim-puckette-max-not-a-true-dataflow-language's conclusion — the two are one argument read across two sections of the same essay, not two separate findings, per observation-puckette-dataflow-claims-confirmed-bridge-not-false-friend.