Christopher Curry

He joined Pye in Cambridge in 1964. He stayed for a few months, then left for the Royal Radar Establishment in Worcestershire. He worked on the radar for the proposed BAC TSR-2. The RRE had been the site of many technological advances such as the integrated circuit in 1952. He stayed for nine months. He moved to the W.R. Grace Laboratories, run by ITT, and stayed for six months.

In April 1966, Curry joined Sinclair Radionics, a company founded by Clive Sinclair in 1961. Curry was to play an important role in getting Sinclair interested in both calculators and computers in his thirteen years with the company.

In 1972, Sinclair Radionics launched its first electronic calculator, the Executive, which was considerably smaller than its competitors since it used hearing-aid-sized batteries. Curry and Jim Westwood had discovered that it was possible to exploit persistence in the diode displays and memory and introduced a timer that removed the power from these components for most of the time. This discovery dramatically improved the lasting-power of the batteries.

Until 1976 Sinclair Radionics had enjoyed 15 years of strong turnover and profit growth. However, the company sustained losses related to difficulties with chip supplies for the Black Watch. As a result there were insufficient internal funds available for the final stages of the pocket TV project Sinclair had been working on for some 10 years. In August 1976 the National Enterprise Board (NEB) provided £650,000 in return for 43 per cent stake in Sinclair Radionics. Sinclair did not like sharing control of his company. Thus, he converted a company he had purchased in 1973, Ablesdeal Ltd, into Westminster Mail Order Ltd, which was itself renamed to Sinclair Instrument Ltd. In this way, he maintained control of his most important projects.

In July 1977, the company was renamed to Science of Cambridge Ltd. Around the same time Ian Williamson showed Curry a prototype computer based around a National Semiconductor SC/MP and some parts scavenged from a Sinclair Cambridge calculator. Curry was impressed and encouraged Sinclair to adopt this as a product; an agreement was reached with Williamson but no contract was ever signed: Nat Semi had offered to redesign the project so that it used only their components and they also offered to manufacture the boards.

Curry and Hauser had become increasingly interested in the idea of selling their own computers and so, on 5 December 1978, they set up Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd (CPU). Their first customer was Ace Coin Equipment Ltd, who needed controllers for their fruit machines.

The Acorn Microcomputer (later to be called the System 1) was launched as the first product of a new company, Acorn Computers Ltd, founded in March 1979. Curry said that they "chose the word Acorn because it was going to be an expanding and growth-oriented system".

After becoming a millionaire as a result of Acorn's success with the BBC Micro project, in 1983 Curry co-founded Redwood Publishing with Michael Potter (former publisher of advertising trade weekly Campaign) and Christopher Ward (former Editor of Daily Express newspaper). The company bought the Acorn User title.

At the time of the Olivetti takeover of Acorn in 1985 Curry founded General Information Systems Ltd (GIS), based on Acorn's Communications Group, and he remains a Director.

GIS specialises in Smart Card technologies for access control and electronic money. In 2012 he announced his latest project with GIS, Care with Canary, a wireless sensor system that allows family members to remotely monitor relatives living alone and triggers alerts.