Some information about Parham Data Products

A brief history:

 

Parham Data Products is a sole proprietorship led by Wayne Parham. Prototyping and hardware and software development is typically done in-house. For large scale manufacturing projects, some of the work is subcontracted to high quality firms for assembly, packaging and shipping. Software and firmware projects are developed by Wayne Parham, himself.

Wayne Parham started his career as an engineer for Data General. This was during a time of rapid advancement in microprocessors, but business was done exclusively on minicomputers and mainframes. So Parham tended to focus on large systems in the early days of his career. He often reminisces about that era in his life, when Tracy Kidder wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning book - "The Soul of a New Machine" - which was about Data General engineers developing the MV/8000 computer system.

These were days when almost all computer companies were on the east coast, mostly near Boston along Route 128. Silicon Valley wasn't the "tech hotshot" that it is today. But the beginnings were there - Intel, Apple and Microsoft were all in their infancy. And while microprocessors were initially only useful for embedded systems, a hobbyist groundswell was beginning. MITS had created the Altair 8800, which contained an Intel 8080 microprocessor and could run the CP/M operating system. Apple had introduced their Apple II computer, which began to become very popular. And by 1981, even IBM had entered the market with their PC, which gave microcomputers some legitimacy in business and put Microsoft on the map.

This changing industry prompted Wayne Parham to open Parham Data Products in 1984. He generated cashflow largely by supporting Data General customers, supplementing that income doing custom design work. Most of the early Parham Data customers were manufacturers in the oil and gas industry or in finance, but he also solicited new customers in telecom, retail and manufacturing. Parham's main market segment was communications and industrial control, designing custom hardware and software systems that performed tasks like factory assembly line control, cooling tower control and automated manufacturing and testing stations. He also provided custom communications products for large retailers that had thousands of cash registers needing interfaces to various devices and data collection systems.

Most PDP designs were built using microprocessors having digital and analog I/O circuits, sensors and control systems. Naturally, this required not only hardware engineering but firmware development. Wayne Parham usually programmed in assembly language or in C, compiling the source to binary to create a PROM firmware chip. There were also times when customers wanted systems programming or applications development - purely software solutions - so Parham began to offer software services in addition to his hardware design work.

One example was in the oil and gas industry. Parham was asked to develop a "tubing movement program," which was a tool used by those designing oil well completions. This kind of program calculates the forces and stresses of a downhole tubing string under various conditions. Another software effort was to create animations showing how various components and oil tools were used to create a well and how they operate underground, inside the well.

The requirement of photo-realistic rendering of three-dimensional equipment models - and the creation of hundreds of frames for animations - necessitated the processing power of one of Parham's most ambitious designs, the Parham Data Products 8401 Parallel Processor. This processor was actually a network of several processors built using Inmos Transputer chips. Nothing else in the early 1990s could have done it, so that became an interesting niche market offering for Parham Data products at the time.

Parham Data continues to provide custom hardware and software, having experience in embedded controllers, oil and gas, finance, retail, telecom and defense fields. If you have something that you would like to build, let us know and we'd love to talk to you about it!