Tim King, Creator of Tripos OS That Powered the Amiga, Dies at 78

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Tim King, a British computer scientist who built the operating system at the heart of the Commodore Amiga, passed away in 2026 at the age of 78. As a Cambridge PhD student in the late 1970s, King developed Tripos, a preemptive multitasking OS written in BCPL, which became the foundation of AmigaDOS when Commodore adopted it for the Amiga's 1985 launch. The Amiga's ability to multitask years before Windows or Mac OS was largely due to the maturity of King's earlier work. After his time at MetaComCo in Bristol, King founded Perihelion in 1986 to work on parallel computing and the Helios OS, and later established UK Online, one of Britain's earliest internet service providers. His career spanned three defining decades of computing, leaving a lasting mark on operating systems, personal computing, and early consumer internet.

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