Because we were one of the only schools with the technology or the skills at that time, the project was implemented through the newly-incorporated Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. At the time I was the designated artist and animator in the ITP. I worked directly with Martin Nizenholtz, who later made quite a name for himself setting up Ogilvey and Mather's cutting edge New Media advertising group.

As a government-sponsored project on a PBS channel, our 50-page teletext "magazine" was heavy on information and light on advertising. Still, I tried to give the pages a little flair with our "Uncle Sam" theme character.

We focused on:

• Consumer Info
• Recreation
• Sports
• Education
• Government Update
• News (from the Washington Post)

We used the newly-defined Telidon platform, which allowed us to easily and efficiently create graphically sophisticated, highly animated pages. Though crude by today's standards, Telidon was really cutting edge for 1980. You had a total of 14 on-screen colors and its "byte lite" vector graphic language allowed fairly snazzy animated graphics.

One of the implementation challenges: Because of technology limitations (remember - these were the early days), every page had to be under 2000 bytes total.