My Obituary for Dr Tim King, Tripos, AmigaOS, Helios and UK Online Pioneer

SOFTWARE

Parallel computing pioneer went connected to recovered early British ISP UK Online

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

According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed astatine the extremity of July. King was a superb programmer – though he accomplished alternatively much than that.

His astir wide knowledgeable activity was a cardinal constituent of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system. His larboard of Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU became AmigaDOS. His accelerated activity getting it moving connected prototype Amiga hardware helped Commodore motorboat the instrumentality successful 1985 aft its in-house OS task grounded to deliver. As he put it himself: "As a consequence I person the favoritism of having written package utilized by complete 2 cardinal users."

TRIPOS is not good known today, though its Wikipedia article provides a useful overview. King did not create TRIPOS: it was written by Cambridge boffin Dr Martin Richards. TRIPOS was written successful the BCPL programming language, which Richards besides created. The first recorded "hello, world" illustration was written successful BCPL, which was besides utilized to create package for the Xerox Alto. Today, however, it is mostly known arsenic the contiguous ancestor of the C programming language. This page of scans from Australian Personal Computer mag gives a bully explanation of TRIPOS.

While a interrogator astatine the University of Bath, King ported TRIPOS from the DEC PDP-11 to the caller Motorola 68000 CPU. His adjacent occupation was astatine Bristol-based 68000 improvement devices master MetaComCo. For that company, he adapted his caller 68K type of TRIPOS to the SAGE IV machines that MetaComCo used.

Meanwhile, Commodore was processing the Amiga successful the US, but its in-house operating strategy for the caller hardware, known arsenic CAOS, was severely down schedule. Commodore went looking for extracurricular help, and it approached MetaComCo, arsenic this Nosher.net potted history documents.

King not only ported TRIPOS to the prototype Amiga hardware, but besides integrated the BCPL-based information pinch Carl Sassenrath's existing Amiga Exec kernel and the Intuition windowing system. King's publication substantially influenced the AmigaDOS bid line, filesystem, and bid structure, arsenic this comparison of the TRIPOS and AmigaDOS manuals demonstrates. We highly urge this 2022 interview, successful which he praises "Exec," whose message-passing creation fitted TRIPOS well.

In his history of CAOS, Amiga "Wizard Extraordinaire" Andy Finkel said: "What we now telephone AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based connected an already existing OS known arsenic Tripos (developed astatine the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by the TRIPOS Research Group, and converted pinch astonishing velocity by Metacomco's Dr. Tim King and his set of programmers)."

The BCPL codification was rewritten successful C for AmigaOS 2, but King was not worried: he had already moved on. He joined Perihelion, a startup created by the late Jack Lang. Lang would spell connected to co-found the Raspberry Pi Foundation pinch Eben Upton – whose PhD supervisor was the very aforesaid Martin Richards.

At Perihelion, King worked on parallel processing systems, notably the Transputer from David May's INMOS. INMOS intended Transputer package to beryllium written successful its unsocial Occam programming language, which implemented the Communicating Sequential Processes exemplary created by the late Professor Tony Hoare.

This was unfamiliar to developers accustomed to Unix and C, truthful King drew connected ideas from TRIPOS to create Helios, a parallel, cluster-scale, Unix-like OS for machines built from aggregate INMOS Transputer chips. Helios-NG is still astir arsenic unfastened source: we wrote astir it successful 2021, and we covered immoderate of the history backmost then.

Neither the Transputer nor Helios became a awesome commercialized success, truthful King turned his attraction elsewhere. Spotting the accelerated maturation of commercialized net connectivity, he founded early British ISP UK Online successful 1994. He sold it to Easynet successful 1996, and it continued arsenic a marque until genitor institution Sky shut it down successful 2011.

King subsequently described himself arsenic a "technical consultant" – first pinch "outsourcing colossus CSC," then done TJJ Ltd, the consulting institution he ran pinch his woman and business partner, Jessica.

There are immoderate rubbing tributes successful various Amiga communities astir the internet, including Reddit /r/amiga and on Hacker News. Both person immoderate contributions from erstwhile co-workers. ®