Pearson’s assistant on “Money for Nothing” was a fellow animator, a jolly, denim-clad man in round glasses named Gavin Blair. Over the span of nearly a decade, the two tossed the concept for their computer-generated show back and forth, and started to assemble a team. Blair roped in John Grace, his former animation lecturer, who made a stop-motion animated television show called Portland Bill in 1983. They brought on Phil Mitchell, an ex-classmate of Blair's and a gifted animator in his own right who had grown tired of working on commercials. He was a mountain of a man who listened to death metal at his desk while he worked. Collectively, they were known as The Hub.

Barron, the music video director, introduced the team to Chris Brough, who had been a producer at Hanna-Barbera and DIC Entertainment. Brough had a production company in Vancouver, BC, and was interested in helping The Hub turn ReBoot into a show. So Pearson, Blair, and Mitchell left the UK — Grace elected to stay behind — and joined Brough in Vancouver in the spring of 1993. (Naturally, tax breaks played a part.) They had no staff, only a handful of computers, and spent the first few months working out of hotels, wondering if they could even pull the whole thing off.

"I thought, ‘Great, I'm going to learn how TV shows are made with computers,’" said Welman, who was hired by The Hub when he was then just a recent computer science grad. "Nobody really knew what they were doing at the time."

By today's technical standards, ReBoot does not hold up well. The animation was stiff and unnatural, especially in its first season, the world harshly lit, and the models primitive in their design. In the years that followed, when ReBoot animators later went for job interviews at animation studios in the United States, potential bosses thought the footage in their portfolios was a draft.

Yet, there was a charm to the city of Mainframe in spite of its stilted visuals. It was well-written — and funny — if a bit heavy-handed at times. Mainframe was primarily inhabited by binomes, people shaped liked ones and zeros. Characters spoke to each other through video windows, at a time when mice and cursors were still novelties, shiny and new. The city’s main strip was called “Baudway” and Dot’s full name was Dot Matrix. Episodes parodied Power Rangers, Mad Max, and James Bond. In the second season, X-Files star Gillian Anderson appeared not as Scully but as a character named Data Nully (her partner: Fax Modem). There were puns galore, and slapstick gags were instrumental to the show.