Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 70
Parallel computing pioneer went on to found early British ISP UK Online
Timothy James King, widely known as Tim King, a renowned programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS, passed away at the age of 70. King's most significant contribution was his port of Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU, which became the foundation for AmigaDOS. This achievement allowed Commodore to launch the Amiga in 1985, following the failure of their in-house OS project.
King's rapid work in getting TRIPOS running on prototype Amiga hardware earned him the distinction of having written software used by over 2 million users. TRIPOS, originally developed by Cambridge boffin Dr. Martin Richards in the BCPL programming language, laid the groundwork for the C programming language. King's expertise extended beyond TRIPOS, as he later adapted his 68K version of TRIPOS for MetaComCo's SAGE IV machines and worked on parallel processing systems, including the Transputer.
Tim King's legacy includes his contributions to the Amiga operating system, his work on parallel processing, and his early foray into the British ISP industry as the founder of UK Online.
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