Max/MSP

Miller Puckette wrote Max at IRCAM in Paris in the mid-1980s to control real-time sound on the institute's own machines. The name honours Max Mathews, the computer-music pioneer at Bell Labs. Opcode sold it commercially from 1990, and in 1997 David Zicarelli's Cycling '74 took over. MSP arrived the same year, letting patches generate audio themselves instead of merely sending MIDI.

A program is a patch: objects such as [metro] and [cycle~] joined by patch cords, where the tilde marks an audio signal. The Jitter video extension followed in 2003. Since Max for Live it runs inside Ableton Live, and in 2017 Ableton bought the whole company.