Parallax Graphics

» see parallaxgraphics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Two Cornell graduates started Parallax Systems in Sunnyvale in November 1982, building their first products out of a garage from work they had done for an engineering thesis. They hired five more engineers away from other graphics board makers and took an office by the middle of 1983. Then they did the sensible thing and brought in someone else to run the company, because neither of them wanted to. In February 1984 the name changed to Parallax Graphics and $1.75 million came in from Hambrecht & Quist and Bay Partners.

The first product line was called Rampage, a graphics terminal built around a bit-sliced drawing processor of the company's own design. It drew 12 million pixels a second and understood 85 drawing primitives in hardware, polygons and flood fills among them, on a board that plugged into a DEC minicomputer. It was shown at the National Computer Graphics Association conference in Chicago in 1983 and reviewed as fast. By 1986 the Rampage name was gone and the boards were built on custom CMOS gate arrays instead, with the 1280 Series doing 1280 by 1024 and emulating NTSC video alongside it.

Dynatech Corporation of Burlington, Massachusetts bought the company in May 1989 for an undisclosed amount. Dynatech had bought Cromemco the year before, so it was assembling a small collection of computer companies that had each peaked slightly earlier. Parallax kept running as an independent subsidiary, and two months after the acquisition it licensed its Viper board to Sony for the NEWS Unix workstation.

~ the dossier ~

~ video in a window ~

The product that defines Parallax is XVideo, a 24 bit framebuffer card that put live video in a window on a Unix workstation. In 1993 this was not a feature of the operating system. It was a card you bought, and the customers who bought it were hospitals running telemedicine, laboratories recording experiments, trading desks watching tickers, and government buyers who did not explain themselves. The cheaper siblings, PowerVideo and MultiVideo, were EISA boards aimed at videoconferencing and at the thing everybody expected to be enormous by 1996, video on demand.

The software was the real asset. VideoStream started on the Sun SPARCstation, moved to the HP 9000 in late 1993, then to IBM's PowerPC workstations under AIX after a 1995 alliance, then to Solaris. A company of this size porting one video stack across four Unix vendors in six years tells you what the market looked like: nobody had won, so you had to be everywhere.

~ the page they left up ~

On 30 November 1998 Dynatech closed the sales, engineering, support and manufacturing operations. What makes this one unusually legible is that the company wrote its own ending down and left it on the web, where the Internet Archive caught it two weeks later. The page says the operations closed effective 30 November 1998, that www.parallax.com would move to www.parallaxgraphics.com until 31 December 1999, and that board repairs would be done until that same date. It gives a phone number in the 408 area code for getting an RMA.

Below that, the company released everything. Source code, the Software Essentials package, the video development environment, every manual, with written permission to download and reproduce the lot for anyone who still owned a board. Underneath sits a Year 2000 warranty statement promising that Parallax hardware does not use dates and will work correctly in the twenty first century, which the company was not going to see much of. The last heading on the page is Alternative video sources, and the content under it reads "(Under construction)".

~ who kept the domain ~

The parent outlasted the subsidiary and not by much. Dynatech renamed itself Acterna and filed for Chapter 11 in 2003. The successor domain is a parking stub of 114 bytes today, and parallax.com belongs to an entirely different Parallax, the company that sells microcontroller and robot kits for classrooms, so a search for this one lands you in a school electronics catalogue. I would never have met one of these cards anyway. A single one cost more than everything I had in 1998, which was a desktop PC and a dial-up line.

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