Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 71
Parallel computing pioneer went on to found early British ISP UK Online
Dr. Timothy James King, a renowned programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS that transformed into AmigaDOS, has passed away at the age of 71. According to his family, he departed in the latter part of July. King's most significant contribution was his role as a crucial component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system.
He successfully ported Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU, which ultimately became AmigaDOS. King's quick work on getting it running on prototype Amiga hardware played a pivotal role in helping Commodore launch the machine in 1985, following the failure of their in-house OS project. He once stated, "As a result, I have the distinction of having written software used by over 2 million users."
TRIPOS, though not well-known today, was the brainchild of Dr. Martin Richards, who also created the BCPL programming language. King's work on TRIPOS, originally written in BCPL, laid the foundation for the development of C. He later ported TRIPOS from the DEC PDP-11 to the Motorola 68000 CPU while working at Bristol-based 68000 development tools specialist MetaComCo.
King's integration of TRIPOS with Carl Sassenrath's existing Amiga Exec kernel and the Intuition windowing system greatly influenced the AmigaDOS command line, filesystem, and command structure. His contributions to AmigaOS are still recognized and respected in the Amiga community.
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