My lab purchased a digital color frame buffer in 1980 for 30K. That would be around 150K in current prices. It had a screen buffer of 512 by 512 of one byte, i.

My lab purchased a digital color frame buffer in 1980 for 30K. That would be around 150K in current prices. It had a screen buffer of 512 by 512 of one byte, i.e. quarter megabyte memory. It was dual port- write to memory, read onto display. Memory price was the bottle neck then. Four years after that the Apple Mac came out with 1/8 megabyte B/W memory for $3K, e.g. arguably the first consumer graphics computer. Again its price was memory bound.