in 1974, evans & sutherland released the first commercial framebuffer, the picture system, costing about $15,000. it was capable of producing resolutions of up to 512 by 512 pixels in 8-bit grayscale, and became a boon for graphics researchers who did not have the resources to build their own framebuffer. the new york institute of technology would later create the first 24-bit color system using three of the evans & sutherland framebuffers. each framebuffer was connected to an rgb color output (one for red, one for green and one for blue), with a digital equipment corporation pdp 11/04 minicomputer controlling the three devices as one.