By the way, I wonder which other commercially available frame buffer based graphics controller have been released before the Dazzler. Cost of memory had been a serious obstacle when designing frame buffer controllers before. It seems the first frame buffer based commercial offering probably has been Evans & Sutherlands Picture System (see
https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/brochures/evanssutherland.3d.1974.102646288.pdf) in the year 1974, which is ahead of but not that far away from the Dazzler.
I'm not sure why you're calling this a framebuffer based system? If you read the specs this is pretty clearly a vector based display engine. The "Functional Specifications" describe display rates in terms of the maximum number of line segments or characters it can stroke at 30FPS and the refresh buffer is 8K of 36 bit words containing coordinate data, not pixels. It appears to be a descendant of the
Line Drawing System-1 from 1969. Also,
Here's the a manual on Bitsavers that definitely makes it clear this is a vector system...
Oh. I see there's a link to this brochure in the Wikipedia article about framebuffers. Insert your own warning about taking anything on Wikipedia at face value without fact checking it. Evans and Sutherland did important work with the development of accelerated framebuffers (they were famous for providing some of the first solid polygon flight simulators, for instance), and they had in their lab a framebuffer system in the mid-70's that was cited as prior art in a lawsuit about paint programs (see below), but, yeah, this "Picture System" is *not* a framebuffer and it doesn't look like they were really doing framebuffers commercially until the 1980's.
A very impressive example of an early framebuffer system would be the
Xerox Superpaint from 1973. This device has as much memory as a late 1980's SuperVGA card. (About 300Kb, enough to hold a 640x480x8 bit image.) The main gotchya is it's stored in shift registers, not RAM, so access to it was a lot more clumsy than framebuffers just slightly newer. (IC memory storage was changing so rapidly in the early-mid-1970's. Don Lancaster used shift registers on the original TV Typewriter in 1973, but by the very next year he was already a huge advocate for SRAM in the TVT-II, and the Apple I's shift register-based video was a complete dinosaur in 1976.) I don't know if SuperPaint actually counts as "commercially available", but it did find its way into quite a few television productions throughout the 1970's.
Quantel was selling commercial digital framebuffers for TV production as early as 1975, but I'm not going to give them any credit because they went full **tard patenting prior art from researchers from the late 1960's onward, claiming they invented it and filing bogus lawsuits. Paint programs with framebuffers (implemented in magnetic core, or even drum memory) date back to at least 1969, and ultimately Quantel got their butts handed to them in 1997 after they tried to sue Adobe for Photoshop infringing on bogus patents they got for their early 80's "Paintbox" system. Nice try guys, not cool.
It's well documented the DAZZLER is the first for the S-100 hobby computers:
en.wikipedia.org
The price of $1,395 probably puts this *slightly* out of the "hobby" category (although, let's be realistic, by the time you'd expanded a Altair or similar enough to do anything serious with it you were in this ballpark anyway), but strictly speaking the
Intecolor 8001, which was the "terminal-only" predecessor of the CompuColor 8001 (but was technically a fully programmable 8080 computer) can display pictures of similar resolution... well, actually, situationally better than, the Dazzler. Of course, unless your program is running on the terminal's built-in CPU this setup does not count as a "framebuffer".
I guess the thing to keep in mind when trying to crown someone as "first" in this race is that both framebuffers generally and color graphics more broadly were very much on the minds of people working in the hobby computer space. (For instance, one of the first issues of Byte has an article by Don Lancaster on how to convert a TV Typewriter into crude color display.) The Dazzler might have been the first cheap product intended to be slotted into an S-100 machine to go on sale, but it was just a matter of luck, really. That period from late 1975 through 1976 really is amazing in terms of just how many things were coming together all at once, thanks to the breakneck speed at which the enabling tech like semiconducter memories were coming down in price.
As much as I hate to do it my inclination is slightly towards giving the Apple II credit as the first really "complete" color framebuffer hobby computer. The Dazzler is "neat" and the card itself was cheap-ish, but you need a pretty good S-100 computer to slot it into and it has severe limitations, like no text mode, low resolution, and really weird memory mapping. It's crazy to think that the Apple II with its 280x192 resolution (but, granted, still pretty arcane memory mapping) came out just barely over a year later.(*) But the Dazzler certainly deserves its milestone status.
(* And of course the enabling tech there is mostly high-capacity and cheap DRAM.)
