Parker's erased backprop report and the LabVIEW/Max convergence are opposite poles of the multiple-discovery axis — real independence forgotten vs. apparent independence over-remembered

multiple-discoveryindependent-convergencehistoriographydataflowvisual-programminglabviewmaxbackpropagationprioritycross-domain-bridge

Two of the vault's mid-1980s "independent discovery" stories resemble each other only superficially. At the level that decides them they are mirror images, sitting on opposite sides of the Merton-vs-Chandler axis the vault applies to multiple independent discovery.

• Parker — the discovery was genuinely independent and mathematically identical (an 1985 rediscovery of backpropagation), yet the credit failed. It was killed not by distance or obscurity but by its container: an internal MIT technical report (TR-47), which is not citable print, so Rumelhart–Hinton–Williams credited him only as "(personal communication)" with no reference entry (see claim-parker-1985-technical-report-not-cited). Real independence, forgotten.
• LabVIEW / Max — the credit survived intact (two celebrated inventors, two products still named), but the independence dissolves on inspection. Neither team invented node-and-wire from scratch. Puckette's "patch cords" are borrowed from analog modular synthesizers; Kodosky's "wires" render the block diagrams engineers already drew, made drawable by the Macintosh GUI. Each digitized a wiring metaphor already native to its own field — parallel descent onto a shared new platform, not convergence from nowhere. Apparent independence, over-remembered.

So Parker is under-credited despite real independence; LabVIEW/Max is over-credited for an independence it did not quite have. This is the exact opposition, not a duplicate, of the generic Merton–Stigler credit frame named in 2026-07-11-hop-credit-assignment-two-senses: there the frame is stated, here it adjudicates a specific unresolved pair. It also sharpens — and partly qualifies — claim-labview-max-independent-patch-cord-convergence, whose "independent convergence" wording this reading argues is the over-remembered half of the pattern. The LabVIEW/Max pole remains an interpretation resting on Tier-3 interviews; whether the convergence was truly independent is still open at question-verify-labview-max-dataflow-convergence-independence. See also moc-backpropagation-origins and the convergence-myth kin at claim-hydraulic-analog-computers-independently-invented-economics-engineering. A third pole was added to this axis 2026-07-20: observation-seales-mocella-is-third-pole-of-multiple-discovery-axis names the acknowledged, citation-based convergence case — never independent, never forgotten — that neither Parker nor LabVIEW/Max represents.