XVideo, featuring a 24-bit-color framebuffer, was particularly popular in medicine, scientific research (for experimental models), finances (for real-time tracking of stock tickers), and government markets. Its primary technology to this end was VideoStream, which they adapted to PowerVideo, and MultiVideo, XVideo to the specific segments they targeted. Parallax by 1993 targeted its products at the burgeoning video on demand (VOD) segment of the media industry, as well as business and engineering teleconferencing, telemedicine, and video editing workstations. Parallax continued to operate as an independent subsidiary of Dynatech, and in July 1989, they signed a contract with Sony Microsystems of Palo Alto, California, to license their Viper VMEbus display adapter for Sony's NEWS Unix workstation. Dynatech had purchased Cromemco the year before. In May 1989, Dynatech Corporation of Burlington, Massachusetts, announced their acquisition of Parallax Graphics for an undisclosed sum. In February 1984, the company changed its name from Parallax Systems to Parallax Graphics and raised US$1.75 million in venture capital from Hambrecht & Quist and Bay Partners. In windowed mode, the card could generate real-time NTSC video at 30 frames per second in fullscreen mode at NTSC resolution, the card could generate 60 FPS video. The 1280 Series could display graphics at resolutions of 1280 by 1024 pixels as well as a mode emulating NTSC video, at 640 by 482 pixels. The 1280 was available for Q-Bus machines and the IBM PC and PC compatibles. Starting with the 1200 Series family in 1986, Parallax dropped the Rampage name and began developing entries in the heretofore unnamed family around VLSI CMOS gate arrays, with the 1280 Series possessing one and the 1280 Series possessing three. This rendition of Rampage increased the drawing operations per second speed to 88 million. : 368 The company later developed in 1984 a variant of Rampage, the 1000 Series, for Multibus systems as well as for Q-Bus. : 368 It was released initially for Digital Equipment Corporation's Q-Bus–based computers and was lauded for its high speed. Its instruction set comprised 85 primitives, including single operations for polygon, box, circle, and vector drawing commands, as well as modes for opaqueness–transparency, solid flood fill, stippling, outlining, and cut-and-pasting. ![]() : 383 Rampage was a color graphics controller designed around a proprietary bit-slicing drawing processor capable of drawing 12 million pixels per second. The initial entry, the 600 Series, and was unveiled at the National Computer Graphics Association Conference in summer 1983 at the McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois. The company's first product family was called the Rampage Graphics Terminal. : 368 As the founding duo lacked the business acumen to market the company's wares, the duo hired a chief executive officer to manage the company that same year. : 368 Parallax soon moved into a proper office building in Sunnyvale, California, by the summer of 1983. They soon hired five other engineers, all ex-employees of graphics controller manufacturers. ![]() : 13 The company's first products built on the duo's electrical engineering thesis paper and were developed and testbenched from within one of their garages. Parallax Graphics was founded as Parallax Systems in November 1982 by two Cornell University graduates, including Martin "Marty" Picco.
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