--- title: Obituary: AmigaDOS developer Dr. Tim King has passed away description: Dr. Tim King, a key figure in AmigaDOS development, died at the end of July. King developed the Tripos operating system while a student at Cambridge, later... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-amigados-developer-dr-tim-king-has-passed-away-svpdls7pr twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Obituary: AmigaDOS developer Dr. Tim King has passed away | daily.dev og:description: Dr. Tim King, a key figure in AmigaDOS development, died at the end of July. King developed the Tripos operating system while a student at Cambridge, later... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-amigados-developer-dr-tim-king-has-passed-away-svpdls7pr og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/svpdlS7pR.png og:image:alt: Obituary: AmigaDOS developer Dr. Tim King has passed away og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Obituary: AmigaDOS developer Dr. Tim King has passed away **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Dr. Tim King, a key figure in AmigaDOS development, died at the end of July. King developed the Tripos operating system while a student at Cambridge, later bringing it to MetaComCo where it evolved into AmigaDOS for the Amiga computer. He went on to found Perihelion and the ISP UK Online. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Who created AmigaDOS and what was it based on? AmigaDOS was developed from Tripos, an operating system originally created by Dr. Tim King while he was a student at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1979. Tripos was a preemptive multitasking system written in BCPL. King joined MetaComCo in 1984 and brought Tripos with him, where it was adapted into AmigaDOS for the Amiga computer. _daily.dev surfaces retro computing history for developers curious about the roots of modern operating systems._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 29 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-12). **TL;DR:** Commenters are sharing warm, nostalgic tributes to Dr. Tim King, crediting AmigaDOS and TripOS with introducing them to real programming, the command line, and even careers in Unix/Linux, alongside a detailed historical account of how TripOS saved the Amiga launch. **Sentiment:** 85% positive · 13% mixed · 2% skeptical **The case for** - Many credit AmigaDOS as their first real command line and the place they learned C. - Several say their exposure to Amiga/AmigaDOS via TCP/PPP setups led directly into Unix sysadmin careers. - A detailed historical comment explains how the existing TripOS 68k port rescued the Amiga project after the in-house CAOS effort failed. **The pushback** - Some note that TripOS's underlying language BCPL was considered ugly and TripOS itself unremarkable outside the Amiga context. - There's uncertainty/disagreement over technical details, like whether the Amiga's windowing system could truly be disabled by skipping Workbench. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Overwhelmingly nostalgic and appreciative, mixing personal tributes with detailed historical discussion of TripOS's role in the Amiga's creation. **Hottest debate:** Whether Commodore could have succeeded long-term even if the original in-house CAOS effort had continued instead of adopting TripOS. **Open questions** - Would CAOS have been better than TripOS-based AmigaDOS had Commodore pushed on with it? - Could any combination of business and technical decisions have let Commodore survive the 32-bit era? **Highlights** > R.I.P. ! 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. 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. > — [amiga386 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49273286) > Sad, a legacy that can't be replaced. 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. > — [doublerabbit on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49275268) > This is an interesting "what if" story. What if they pushed on with CAOS, would it have been awesome or would the Amiga never have existed as a commercial product. We will never know. > — [bni on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274289) > Alas I suspect that no combination of business and technical decisions could have allowed Commodore to succeed long term. They never had the scale or product market fit to succeed in the 32 bit era. Apple barely made it. > — [marsten on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278435) > Amiga tcp+ppp and a shell account got me into unix. Had to compile my ppp slurp deamon on my shell account to get my amiga online. This was before ISP's became a thing. Thats how I rolled my unix knowledge into a sysadmin career. Good times > — [IronWolve on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49273840) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272655) · 196 points · 29 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Commodore's forgotten Amiga Unix gets a modern revival](https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-s-forgotten-amiga-unix-gets-a-modern-revival-e3rrovkts) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Old Vintage Computing Research](https://daily.dev/posts/old-vintage-computing-research-kyxxsvfzq) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time](https://daily.dev/posts/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-time-iqvwfyauk) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Obituary: Actor Tim Curry, celebrated for his work in games, has passed at age 80](https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-actor-tim-curry-celebrated-for-his-work-in-games-has-passed-at-age-80-yzjowbunz) · Game Developer · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#computing-history](https://daily.dev/tags/computing-history) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-amigados-developer-dr-tim-king-has-passed-away-svpdls7pr) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Obituary: AmigaDOS developer Dr. Tim King has passed away","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-amigados-developer-dr-tim-king-has-passed-away-svpdls7pr","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/obituary-amigados-developer-dr-tim-king-has-passed-away-svpdls7pr"},"datePublished":"2026-08-12T14:49:19.770Z","dateModified":"2026-08-12T21:50:19.011Z","description":"Dr. Tim King, a key figure in AmigaDOS development, died at the end of July. 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