Parallax Inc. is a privately held company in Rocklin, California. Parallax Inc. designs, manufactures, and sells BASIC Stamp microcontrollers, Propeller microcontrollers, microcontroller accessories (such as LCDs, sensors, RF modules, etc.), educational robot kits, and educational curriculum. Parallax is headquartered in Rocklin. The Rocklin office employs thirty-five people in research and development, sales, manufacturing, education, marketing, and technical support. Parallax Inc. has over seventy distributors around the world, including Jameco Electronics. History Originally established in 1987, in Rocklin, California, Parallax Inc. manufactured products such as the ISEPIC, TopRAM, and the first third-party Microchip PIC Programmer. In 1992, the BASIC Stamp 1 microcontroller module was released. In 1995, the BASIC Stamp 2 module was added to the product lineup. By 2002, there were over three million BASIC Stamp microcontrollers in use around the world. In 1997, the Stamps in Class program was created to provide educational resources that addressed the needs of electronic students ages 14 and up. The Boe-Bot is one of the company’s most popular products in the educational program. In 1998, Parallax Inc. formed a partnership with Ubicom (formerly Scenix Semiconductor) to develop tools and BASIC Stamps using their new SX microcontrollers. Company founder Chip Gracey designed the SX-Key Programming Tool to make programming Ubicom’s SX chips affordable. And in 2005, Parallax Inc. and Ubicom formed an agreement in which Parallax Inc. was made the exclusive supplier of the SX microcontroller. In 2006, after eight years of development time, Parallax launched their Parallax Propeller microcontroller. The Propeller 2 multicore processor is under development and does not have a release date yet. The Propeller 2 processor includes features commonly requested by customers such as code protection, additional RAM and more input/output pins. Popular chips and robots The Propeller chip The Propeller is a multicore system that can do real-time simultaneous multiprocessing. It uses eight 32-bit cores called cogs controlled by a bus controller called the Hub. It can be programmed in assembly, C, or in the interpreted Spin programming language. It comes with a software library of objects for a various sets of input/output devices, such as UARTs and a video display controller emulated fully in software. The Propeller is also supported by third-party compiler developers who have developed platforms in C and BASIC. The Parallax Propeller is also recognized as being easy to program. The BASIC Stamp and BASIC Stamp 2 Released in 1995, the BASIC Stamp was so