Tim King, AmigaDOS developer, has died
amiga-news.de
amiga-news.de
It was '96 or '97, and the dotcom boom was just getting started. Deciding to try my luck, I picked up one of the trade papers to look at the job listings. I bought myself a suit at Marks and Spencers and jumped on a tube to go to my first job interview. I took the tube home, and by the time I got to the other end I had a message waiting for me saying I got the job.
I found myself reporting to the brilliant Jack Lang (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/farewell-jack-lang), tweaking software developed by Tim King's company, Perihelion. I really was just making minor tweaks to a bunch of perl scripts, so I managed to stumble through it and not make a total fool of myself. Even though I was working with folks with extremely impressive bodies of work behind them and I was just some scruffy backpacker dude, they were always kind and generous to me. I met some great people there.
I never did get a chance to learn how to pour a beer.
Which was a foot-gun when I came back to it years later, turned it on and discovered I had forgotten everything I needed to know to get it to do anything anymore!
I ended up putting the pack together for a local isp for Amiga users, TCP / ppp and all that jazz. Back when isp's were crawling out of the woodwork all over the place :)
Thank you, Dr. King!
Yes it still exists and has development but it is only limping through the sludge on the back of existing retried developers. I could be wrong.
> King joined MetaComCo and brought Tripos with him to the company.
Those days where if you designed or created something, you could pitch it.
Now with the era of Ai, "Look at what I made boss with just a paragraph of words!" doesn't hold the same upper-class. I never got to play with the Amiga, but I knew how awesome it sounded like to use. Chiptunes.
My story is that my aunt was an IT college tech and used to hand us floppy discs of games when my parents made regular trips to my grandparents back in 1995. She gave me a postage-bag full of floppy discs inside, they were all Amiga games, never got to play them. Unfortunately, we had Pentium.
My condolences.
*corrected date
For anyone interest there's some interesting history about BCPL (the predecessor of C), TRIPOS and engineering at Cambridge in general.
I learned a lot in those three years in Shepton Mallet, as we kept pivoting to ride the wave of the early commercial internet. It's good to think that part of what we built back then is still here, now the consumer parts of Sky Broadband. I believe they still use that old brewery for customer support.
Downstairs from our space were the Perihelion folks, who were working on building VR systems on top of transputers Now that was fun...
That team all went its separate ways over the years, but many of us are still in touch.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131016145634/http://www.amigah...
> Few people have heard of TripOS outside the Amiga market. As a standalone operating system it is unremarkable, however its relation to the AmigaOS makes it interesting. TripOS was developed at Cambridge University on an IBM 3081 (or an earlier IBM mainframe) running a locally-written OS called Phoenix during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The name is derived from the course description at the university. For example, it is possible to read for the mathematics tripos. It is also possible that the 'pos' suffix stood for Portable Operating System.
> At some point during the early 1980s Dr. Tim King ported the OS to the Motorola 68k. The operating system exists on a range of platform during this period, including the PDP11, DG Nova, 68000 (a homebrew 68k machine?), and the GA-16/220.
> The story continues at Commodore in 1984. They had recently bought the Amiga technology and were preparing it for a mainstream market. Development had fallen behind schedule, particularly in the development of the original operating system, dubbed CAOS. This prompted fears that Atari would beat them to the 16-bit market with their off-the-shelf ST range. In a series of meetings it was decided that an outside developer would be contracted to complete the task, abandoning large sections of the existing OS. MetaComCo were chosen as the contractor, as a result of their existing TripOS 68k port. It was a minor task to get the operating system to work on the Amiga prototypes, but required some time to get it to interact with Intuition.
> Reports of the time period indicate that the Los Gatos team, led by Jay Miner, were unhappy with the decision and openly criticised the end result. In particular, the TripOS/Intuition hybrid lacked many of the features they had planned (resource-tracking, etc.).
> A large portion of the TripOS code continued to exist in the Dos.Library, until it was replaced in v36 by a combination of assembler & C. However, the ghost of TripOS could not be exorcised and a small amount of the code lives on in the later AmigaOS releases to ensure compatibility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190420095854/http://www.thule....
> As most of you know, AmigaDOS was not the first choice for the top-level OS/DOS on the Amiga computer. What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos (developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by the TRIPOS Research Group, and converted with amazing speed by Metacomco's Dr. Tim King and his band of programmers). When the original, intended, designed-for-the-Amiga DOS failed to materialize (in what would no doubt be an interesting story in itself), the Amiga was launched with AmigaDOS, and the rest is history, so to speak.
> Carl Sassenrath made the following comment about CAOS at the AmiWest IRC conference: CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions.
Not many people like TRIPOS, or BCPL. It's an ugly language. However, it's thanks to Dr King's early '80s port of it to the 68000, that we even have the Amiga at all. The Amiga team had developed some excellent components of the OS, e.g. Exec as the central multitasking kernel, and Intuition for graphical interfaces, but they had contracted out work on the Amiga's DOS (e.g. the filesystem, loader, process management, command line interface, file APIs), asking them to create what they called CAOS (Commodore Amiga OS), and that totally failed. According to Carl Sassenrath, the contractors loved Unix and their Sun workstations too much and didn't want to hook up to the rest of the Amiga's OS. So they cut that company loose and started looking for an alternative. The existing 68000 port of TRIPOS saved the day, and let the Amiga launch when it did.
Sadly that luck reversed later.
I'm not sure Commodore would have made it to 2000 even under better leadership, but I'm absolutely certain were it not for Gould's cupidity and Ali's braindead decrees, the company probably wouldn't have sunk as hard and fast as it did.
The Register also posted an obituary today:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...