from the October 1981 issue of Your Computer magazine
Chris Curry's Cambridge company, Acorn, is beginning to emerge as one of the strongest personal computer firms in Britain. Its main product, the Acorn Atom, has proved both popular and reliable. The company won the coveted contract to design and build the computer to be marketed by the BBC and accompany the BBC's planned computer literacy series. Chris Curry talks to Duncan Scot.
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The ATOM computer is one of the few approved by the Departments of Industry and Education for purchase by other Government departments. Acorn's other products include its networking system, the Econet, which is designed to link Atoms together in a classroom.
Acorn will shortly be releasing the first of the BBC computers and a larger version of the same system which will be known as the Proton. At present, the company is quartered in four offices in Cambridge — new business accommodation is being built on the outskirts of the city. Its turnover is about £3 million per annum and a new financial controller is planning systems which will take the company into the £15 million to £20 million bracket.
All this has happened in the space of 18 months. Perhaps ironically it was Clive Sinclair, creator and manufacturer of the ZX-80 and ZX-81 personal computers, who led Chris Curry into the field of computing. Curry left school with some A levels and a keen enthusiasm for all things electronic — he used to spend much of his spare time trying to build amplifiers from old television valves.
After working in several different jobs, Curry answered an advertisement, placed by Clive Sinclair, for engineers. Curry was given the job just when Sinclair was starting his work on miniature radios.
"Things really took off when Clive returned from the States with the first single-chip calculator. He gave it to me with a wadge of paper and said 'get that working'. It was completely new to me.
"I built a prototype with another chap in the laboratory. We built a breadboard around the chip and built a keyboard from bent wire. After a little fiddling, the thing worked. It really was like magic to see those numbers appearing on the display; and then when you used one of the functions and the result flew across the screen — it was incredible. To see this happening with this little piece of electronics was really exciting".
By 1977, the fortunes of Sinclair Radionics, the main arm of Sinclair's operation, were waning. The company was ensnarled with the National Enterprise Board; there were technical problems with 'the infamous Black Watch and the first of the Microvision television sets were proving extremely expensive. Clive Sinclair decided to relaunch another company he owned, Science of Cambridge, with Chris Curry in charge.
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