Jeskola Buzz
A modular tracker for Windows from 1997, where synths and effects are wired together with on-screen cables.
Written by Finnish developer Oskari Tammelin. Where a classic tracker has a fixed number of channels, Buzz has "machines": generators and effects placed in a routing graph, each driven by its own pattern. Machines were plugins, and a flood of free user-made synths and effects turned it into one of the most widely used bedroom studios of the late 1990s.
Around 2000 the source code was lost, and development stood still for nearly a decade while users kept it going with third-party patches. Tammelin picked the project up again in 2008 with a rewritten version. Meanwhile the idea lived on in clones and in the way later programs such as Renoise combine a tracker workflow with plugin chains.