The Parallax Story

Parallax began with a simple idea that still guides us today: technology becomes much more interesting when you can understand it, build with it, and make it do something real that's greater than the product you started with.

The story starts in Sacramento, California, in the early 1980s. Parallax founder Chip Gracey was 13 when he became fascinated with programming and electronics. A junior-high computer teacher, Bob Wofford, recognized his interest and soon had him helping other students learn. At home, Chip's father would bring an Apple II computer from his office for the weekend. Chip wrote BASIC programs, explored assembly language, took the computer apart, connected hardware to it, and spent the week thinking about what he would try when the computer came home again the following Friday.

That curiosity quickly became something more than a hobby. While still in high school, Chip started Innovative Software Engineering from his bedroom and developed the ISEPIC, a hardware device for the Commodore 64. About 20,000 were sold around the world through computer clubs, magazine advertising, and word of mouth. After graduating from high school in 1986, Chip decided that building technology was more compelling than following a conventional college path. He and longtime friend Lance Walley formed Parallax in 1987. Lance brought writing, graphics, programming, and business skills that helped turn Chip's engineering ideas into commercial products.

From Computer Tools to Microcontrollers

Parallax's first products reflected the personal-computer revolution of the 1980s: Apple II sound digitizers, programming hardware, and tools for 8051 microcontrollers. But microcontrollers soon became the company's focus.

In 1990, Parallax introduced one of the first third-party programmers for Microchip's new PIC microcontrollers. That work gave Chip extensive experience with the problem facing engineers at the time: microcontrollers were tremendously useful, but the development tools and programming process made them difficult for many people to use. Parallax subsequently developed the ClearView Mathias PIC emulator and other development tools, establishing the company in the emerging embedded-systems market.

That experience led to the product that changed Parallax.

The BASIC Stamp

In 1992, Parallax introduced the BASIC Stamp. This product was a tremendous hit, and the first major hobbyist microcontroller available to the public.

Instead of requiring users to become microcontroller specialists, the BASIC Stamp packaged the essential elements of an embedded computer into a small module and allowed it to be programmed in an approachable version of BASIC. Its name came from its size—roughly comparable to a postage stamp.

The concept seems obvious today, but at the time it was transformative. An engineer, hobbyist, student, scientist, artist, or inventor could connect sensors, switches, motors, displays and other electronics and make something useful without first mastering a complicated microprocessor development system.

The BASIC Stamp 2 followed in 1995 with an improved PBASIC language and significantly greater capability. It became one of the defining products of the early embedded-computing and electronics hobby movement. By the end of 1998, Parallax had sold more than 125,000 BASIC Stamp modules through more than 40 worldwide sales channels, and by 2002 more than three million BASIC Stamps were in use.

More than thirty years later, Parallax still manufactures and supports the BASIC Stamp 2. In an industry where products routinely disappear after only a few years, that longevity reflects another part of the Parallax philosophy: when customers build classrooms, products and businesses around our hardware, we take that commitment seriously.

From Microcontrollers to Education

Something unexpected happened as the BASIC Stamp became popular: teachers began using it.

In 1997, Parallax formally embraced education with the Stamps in Class program and What's a Microcontroller? Rather than teaching programming only on a computer screen, students wrote code and immediately saw the results in real circuits—LEDs illuminated, sensors responded, servos moved, and measurements changed.

This became the foundation of the Parallax approach to education: learn by building.

Robotics followed almost naturally. Idaho educator Chuck Schoeffler had been building BASIC Stamp robots for his students using improvised parts, servos and handmade chassis. His work helped inspire Parallax to combine the BASIC Stamp Board of Education with a simple metal robot chassis. That platform became the Boe-Bot, supported by Andy Lindsay's extensive Robotics with the Boe-Bot curriculum.

The Boe-Bot became one of the most recognizable educational robots of its era. The same basic Parallax chassis eventually formed the foundation for several generations of robots, including the Shield-Bot for Arduino, ActivityBot with the Propeller, and today's cyber with the BBC micro. Parallax reports that more than one million robots have been produced through its educational programs.

Education had become much more than another market for Parallax. Curriculum development, teacher training, technical support, classroom kits and long-term product availability became core parts of the company.

Designing Our Own Microcontrollers

Meanwhile, Parallax was moving deeper into semiconductor technology.

In the late 1990s, the company worked with Scenix Semiconductor on the high-speed SX microcontroller and developed the SX-Key programming and debugging system. Parallax eventually acquired the remaining manufacturing capability for the SX product family. The experience reinforced an idea that had been developing for years: rather than continually designing products around somebody else's microcontroller architecture, Parallax could create its own.

Development of that new architecture began in 2001 under Chip Gracey's technical leadership.

The result was the Propeller 1 Multicore Microcontroller, released in 2006.

The Propeller took an unusual approach to embedded computing. Instead of building a conventional microcontroller around interrupts and an ever-growing collection of fixed hardware peripherals, it provided eight independent 32-bit processors—called cogs—that could operate simultaneously while sharing common resources.

That architecture made real-time embedded programming remarkably deterministic. One cog could generate video while another handled serial communication, another monitored sensors, and another controlled motors. Much of the functionality traditionally implemented as dedicated peripheral hardware could instead be created in software.

The Propeller found its way into robotics, industrial equipment, medical devices, aerospace systems, test equipment, artistic installations and commercial products. Just as the BASIC Stamp had reflected Parallax's ideas about making microcontrollers approachable, the Propeller reflected Chip's ideas about how a microcontroller itself could be designed differently.

Propeller 2

The next step was considerably more ambitious.

Parallax and Chip Gracey spent approximately fourteen years developing the successor to the original Propeller. The project involved architecture, custom silicon design, fabrication, testing, revisions, programming languages, development tools and extensive collaboration with the Parallax community.

In November 2020, the Propeller 2 Multicore Microcontroller was released.

Propeller 2 retained the multicore philosophy of the original while dramatically expanding its performance and I/O capabilities. It gave Parallax a modern, powerful microcontroller architecture designed around deterministic multiprocessing and unusually flexible hardware interaction.

The progression was remarkable: the company that had begun by writing software for Apple II computers and building programmers for other companies' microcontrollers had become a fabless semiconductor company designing its own multicore processors.

Evolving With the Classroom

Parallax has never believed that education should be tied permanently to a single processor or programming language.

As technology changed, the educational program expanded. The Shield-Bot brought the Parallax robotics approach to Arduino C. The ActivityBot combined robotics with the Propeller and later BlocklyProp, Parallax's graphical programming environment. Partnerships with organizations including Project Lead The Way and CYBER.ORG expanded the company's role in engineering, computer science and cybersecurity education.

The BBC micro and Python opened another chapter.

Working with CYBER.ORG, Parallax developed the cyber, combining the accessibility of the BBC micro and Python with the electronics, sensors, breadboarding and robotics experience developed through decades of Parallax education. A Propeller microcontroller on the cyber board works alongside the micro to handle robotics and hardware functions, allowing students to progress from Python programming into increasingly sophisticated physical-computing applications.

Today, Parallax educational systems span robotics, electronics, sensors, artificial intelligence, wireless communication and cybersecurity. Students may work in PBASIC, C, Python, MakeCode, Blockly or Spin depending upon the platform and learning objective. What has remained constant is the emphasis on physical computing: write the code, build the circuit, connect the sensor, make it move, measure what happens, and understand why.

Built, Supported and Taught for the Long Term

Parallax has always been somewhat unusual for a technology company.

We design products. We write software. We develop curriculum. We manufacture electronics. We design microcontrollers. We train teachers. And when customers need help, they can contact people who actually know and use the products.

Many Parallax products are designed and manufactured in California, and the company has maintained products far longer than is typical in the electronics industry. The BASIC Stamp 2, introduced in 1995, remains in production more than thirty years later. Generations of students have learned with the Boe-Bot, while newer classrooms use micro, Python, AI sensors and cybersecurity activities. At the same time, engineers continue to design sophisticated commercial systems around the Propeller family.

That combination is important because Parallax has never been simply a component reseller, a robotics company, a semiconductor company, or an educational publisher.

It is a company built around making technology understandable and useful through hands-on experience.

Nearly four decades after Parallax began in a California apartment, the technology has changed enormously. Apple II computers gave way to microcontrollers. BASIC Stamps led to robots. Robots led into classrooms. Experience with other manufacturers' processors led Parallax to design its own. PBASIC was joined by Spin, C, Blockly, MakeCode and Python. Sensors have expanded into wireless systems, machine vision, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

But the motivation behind all of it is surprisingly close to where the story began: the excitement of connecting software to hardware and discovering that something you built actually works.

That is the Parallax story—and we're still building it.