[2]According to several contemporary sources, Stephenson was the driving force behind the project; "whenever there was a problem she appears to have 'moved heaven and earth' to get it back on the tracks.

A secondary concern was that the time delay between announcing and introducing the computer would be lengthy, a period in which existing purchases could be funded instead.

"[3] The physical design required a PET-like all-in-one case, headphones output for voice and sound effects, and a trackball for mouse-like pointing support.

[5] The specification was considerably in advance of the state of the art of the time, and when it was delivered commentators immediately reversed their earlier concerns and suggested the machine was too powerful, and would therefore be available in too small numbers.

[4] To deliver such a machine, Robert Arn, a member of the CATA team, set up CEMCORP, the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation.

[6] An additional $5 million in funding was announced to cover development of new software applications, while the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) was asked to convert 30 existing programs to the new machine.

[3] At the time, only the ICON met the GEMS requirements, which cut its purchase price from around CAD$2500 to a mere $495[7] (USD$2700 and $696)[8] – less expensive than most existing microcomputers.

The release of the IBM Personal Computer/AT in 1984 reopened the debate and made nightly news, as it used a newer and more advanced CPU than the ICON: the 80286.

Around this time other platforms, such as the Waterloo PORT networking system, gained approval for the government support that had originally been the province of the ICON.

The original Microtel machines were first introduced to Ontario schools in 1984 in small numbers, packaged in a short-lived dark brown case.

A 1992 article on the topic complained: Bette Stephenson favoured top-down decision making and as a result got trapped by her tunnel vision.

The ICON2 sported a redesigned case, a detached keyboard with integrated trackball, expanded RAM, and facilities for an internal hard disk.

It also included TI's TMS5220 speech chip, originally designed for the TI-99, and would speak the vaguely obscene word "dhtick" when starting up.

This contrasts with the system seen on PET computers of the same era, where the user saved files directly to the shared floppy as if they were attached to the local machine.

Both the client and server ran the Unix-like QNX as their operating system with the addition of network file-sharing, the basic portions of it embedded in ROM.

QNX 2.0.1 included a modest one called "House", and another was built at least to the prototype stage by Helicon Systems in Toronto and appeared in one form as Ambience, though its capabilities were limited.