[1][2]: 13  The company's first products were built on the duo's electrical engineering thesis paper and were developed and testbenched from within one of their garages.

[3]: 368  The founding duo lacked business and marketing acumen, and hired a chief executive officer to manage the company that year.

[4] The initial entry, the 600 Series,[5] and was unveiled at the National Computer Graphics Association Conference in mid-1983 at the McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois.

Its instruction set comprises 85 primitives,[4] including single operations for polygon, box, circle, and vector drawing commands, and modes for opaqueness–transparency, solid flood fill, stippling, outlining, and cut-and-pasting.

Its primary technology to this end was VideoStream, which they adapted to PowerVideo, and MultiVideo, XVideo to the specific segments they targeted.

[12] 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.

[14] Initially developed for Sun Microsystems's SPARCstation, Parallax ported its VideoStream-based products for the HP 9000 in late 1993.