Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 70

OBIT Dr Timothy James King, the programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS that became AmigaDOS, has died aged 70.

According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July.

King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that.

His most widely experienced work was a key component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system.

His port of Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU became AmigaDOS.

His rapid work getting it running on prototype Amiga hardware helped Commodore launch the machine in 1985 after its in-house OS project failed to deliver.

As he put it himself: "As a result I have the distinction of having written software used by over 2 million users." TRIPOS is not well known today, although its Wikipedia article provides a useful overview.

King did not create TRIPOS: it was written by Cambridge boffin Dr Martin Richards.

TRIPOS was written in the BCPL programming language, which Richards also created.

The first recorded "hello, world" example was written in BCPL, which was also used to develop software for the Xerox Alto.

Today, however, it is mostly known as the immediate ancestor of the C programming language.

This page of scans from Australian Personal Computer magazine gives a good description of TRIPOS.

While a researcher at the University of Bath, King ported TRIPOS from the DEC PDP-11 to the new Motorola 68000 CPU.

His next job was at Bristol-based 68000 development tools specialist MetaComCo.