Tim King, Who Brought Tripos to the Amiga as AmigaDOS, Dies at End of July

Dr. Tim King, a central figure in the Amiga’s software history, died in late July, his family confirmed. King built the Tripos operating system — a preemptive multitasking system written in BCPL — as a student at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1979. When he joined MetaComCo in 1984, he carried Tripos with him; the company adapted it for the Amiga, and it shipped as AmigaDOS, the disk and process-management layer of the machine’s OS.

His work extended well beyond the Amiga. In 1986 he founded Perihelion, which pursued operating systems, parallel processing, and transputer technology, and he later launched the internet service provider UK Online. The through-line across those ventures was systems software and novel computing architectures rather than any single platform.

King’s legacy sits at a formative moment in 1980s personal computing: a research OS conceived in academia became the foundation of a commercial machine that shaped a generation of enthusiasts and developers. His passing is being marked by the retro-computing community that still maintains and studies that lineage.