Timothy James King, AmigaDOS architect and early ISP founder, dies at 70

Timothy James King, a distinguished software engineer, died at 70 after a career that shaped early personal computing. While at the University of Bath he adapted the TRIPOS system for the Motorola 68000, a version that became AmigaDOS and was crucial to Commodore’s 1985 Amiga launch. He continued at MetaComCo, integrating the port with the Amiga Exec kernel and the Intuition windowing system, influencing the command line and file system.

Later, at Perihelion, King applied his TRIPOS experience to build Helios, a Unix-like OS for INMOS Transputer clusters. Spotting the rise of the internet, he founded the ISP UK Online in 1994, which was sold to Easynet in 1996 and operated under Sky until 2011. In his final years he acted as a technical consultant for CSC and through TJJ Ltd, the consultancy he ran with his wife Jessica. Tributes flowed from Amiga communities worldwide following his passing.