Page "Television Interface Adaptor" Paragraph 5

At the time the 2600 was being designed, RAM was extremely expensive, measured in dollars ( or cents ) per byte.

A typical 320 by 200 pixel display with even a single bit per pixel would require 8000 bytes of memory to store the framebuffer.

This would not be suitable for a platform that aimed to cost only a few hundred dollars.

Even dramatic reductions in the resolution would not reduce the cost of memory to reasonable levels.

Instead, the design team decided to remove the memory-based framebuffer entirely.