What about the Observer pattern. If I am not mistaken , MVC was introduced in Smalltalk and thereafter several publish/ subscribe patterns have come into picture.
The observer pattern (a subset of the publish/subscribe pattern) is a software design pattern in which an object, called the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods. It is mainly used to implement distributed event handling systems.
Ex : The Save button gets enabled in an editior, only when there is data to be saved. Another example of the observer pattern is Document View architecture in MFC, where in the view gets updated when the document changes .
