Stephen Parry (B2 1959-64) was born in Birmingham in 1946, one of the original baby boomers. His mother Jean was a doctor and his father Fred was vicar of Selly Oak.

Stephen went to Bourneville Primary School, within sniffing distance of the Cadbury’s chocolate factory, from the age of 7 he boarded at King’s College Choir School in Cambridge. At 13, he went on to Marlborough College. A highlight of his time there was creating a calculator of out of some transistors provided by his physics teacher.

He won a place at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where alongside his undergraduate degree he took a Masters in Computer Science – the only such course available in 1966.

He qualified as a chartered accountant and worked initially for Arthur Andersen. In the early 70s Stephen moved back to Birmingham; he met Sally on a skiing holiday in Italy. They married in 1979 in the beautiful cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford.

Stephen had just landed a plum job in France with Booz Allen consultants. Stephen resigned from his job in 1981 to set up his own company, Paris Sport Info. The company cleverly combined Stephen’s fascination for sport and computers. He successfully persuaded the Roland Garros Tennis Championship to adopt a computerised system – which he had invented – for continuously gathering the scores from each court and transmitting them to the media. He then sold the system to Wimbledon; other major tennis tournaments followed suit, and Stephen travelled the world marketing and operating his system in a variety of exotic locations. He also found time to conjure up other, mostly sports-related, IT inventions, culminating in the coveted award of a US patent for ball tracking. As a very keen golfer, he was one of many who made use of his ball tracking invention to improve his game.