Hi, I'm not a Maya user, so I cannot answer the first question, but as far as I know you don't have history dependency in 3dsMax.
About freezing nodes transforms for animation, the fastest way to achieve it is to press ALT and right click over the item you want to freeze. It opens a quad menus and on top-left you'll find "Freeze Transform" and "Freeze Rotation" along with "Transform to Zero" and "Rotation to Zero".
Then you can check actual controllers tree in Command Panel under "Motion" tab, section "Assign Controller", or just open a Track View - Curve Editor.
Yeah I know what you mean man but it's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a command in max that resets the attribute/parameters of a mesh. Thanks anyway.
I'm not sure if you're looking to collapse the history stack which is a modifier stack in max not really a history because you can move the modifiers up and down. But to do that you right click the list and pick Collapse To or Collapse All.
If you're looking to clear the transform and scale data you go to the hierarchy tab again click pivot and click reset transform and scale. This clears the history of Postion, scale and rotation without messing with the pivot or adding modifiers.
Or you can nuke it from orbit (a popular option with modelers mostly because they don't know about the other buttons) but not always friendly with animators. Go to the utilities tab > Reset XForm (Transform) > Reset Selected. You can't undo this, and it adds a modifier to your stack causing you to collapse your stack if you wish to keep making edits.
I suggest first trying the first option, reset scale and transform, then if that doesn't do the trick reset xform. A lot of people jump to the nukes and like I pointed out it pisses off animators who might later use the local pivot because it doesn't reorient the local pivot to the object but to the world. If the above box was rotated a bit the pivot would still align to the world up making it hard to move the box locally on its particular up axis. This can bite modelers in the ass too.
To freeze a particular axis click on the hierarchy tab and then click link info. There you can check and lock any axis to keep it from moving/rotating/scaling that way.
You're looking for collapsing the stack that is the equivalent of delete history. Reset xform is the max version of freeze transform although the max one is better as I remember it actually generates the correct offset from zero based on the pivot points location when you apply the reset xform.
Most of the time if you're just modelling then you don't need anything resembling "delete history", since Max doesn't really work that way. As malcolm says, the closest thing to that is collapsing the stack, since that basically "bakes down" any modifiers into the base geometry.
Usually, though, you don't need to collapse the stack all that much except for when doing UV unwrap work.
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About freezing nodes transforms for animation, the fastest way to achieve it is to press ALT and right click over the item you want to freeze. It opens a quad menus and on top-left you'll find "Freeze Transform" and "Freeze Rotation" along with "Transform to Zero" and "Rotation to Zero".
Then you can check actual controllers tree in Command Panel under "Motion" tab, section "Assign Controller", or just open a Track View - Curve Editor.
If you're looking to clear the transform and scale data you go to the hierarchy tab again click pivot and click reset transform and scale. This clears the history of Postion, scale and rotation without messing with the pivot or adding modifiers.
Or you can nuke it from orbit (a popular option with modelers mostly because they don't know about the other buttons) but not always friendly with animators. Go to the utilities tab > Reset XForm (Transform) > Reset Selected. You can't undo this, and it adds a modifier to your stack causing you to collapse your stack if you wish to keep making edits.
I suggest first trying the first option, reset scale and transform, then if that doesn't do the trick reset xform. A lot of people jump to the nukes and like I pointed out it pisses off animators who might later use the local pivot because it doesn't reorient the local pivot to the object but to the world. If the above box was rotated a bit the pivot would still align to the world up making it hard to move the box locally on its particular up axis. This can bite modelers in the ass too.
To freeze a particular axis click on the hierarchy tab and then click link info. There you can check and lock any axis to keep it from moving/rotating/scaling that way.
Usually, though, you don't need to collapse the stack all that much except for when doing UV unwrap work.