ScuzzBlog: Diaries August 2026
Entry 13th August 2026: Post 1: Dr Tim King.
Dr Tim King.
In truth without Dr Tim King there would never have been an Amiga.
Had it not been for Metacompco and Tripos the launch of the Amiga
on July 23 1985 would not have happened and who knows what that
would have meant for the platform. Thankfully the legendary Dr Tim
King and his wife came to the rescue and so it was that the Amiga
had its WB.
And so today it is with sadness that I learn of the loss of Dr Tim
King. Thankfully his work lives on and still sustains the active
Amiga user base. Tim was without doubt a pioneer ahead of his time.
His legacy lives on. He will be sadly missed.
I am fighting the heat here so unfortunately I have to keep my
comments to a minimum. Following on from the sad news of the loss
of Tim King I thought I would summarise how I recall matters. You
will excuse my history as its been a while now.
I first came across the name of Tim King during my CP/M days when
I was in the thick of Digital Research and reading up on another
lost hero Gary Kildall.
Dr Tim King had been active on the computer scene since its modern
birth during the seventies and early eighties. He was a British
academic and worked with his wife developing Tripos. Based in
Bristol, if I recall, he became involved with the 68000 chip porting
Tripos to systems such as Pascal using BCPL on a Sage IV machine.
His wife worked for Metacompco primarily working on documentation.
Tim was working toward tenure at the university and when this was
withdrawn he joined his wife at Metacompco.
Fast forward to the Amiga and the 1985 launch it had become very
apparent to the guys working on the Amiga 1000 that their CAOS OS
was not going to be ready for the July event. They approached Tim
with an Amiga No 3 , I believe, to prepare the system software.
He returned from Los Gatos carrying the Amiga on the seat of the
plane to develop the system. Much work had been done by Carl
Sassenrath.
Having returned with a working model he impressed the team who
commissioned him to develop the OS. If I recall he was paid a
sum of thirty thousand dollars. Maybe wrong.
One of the unique ways the Amiga avoided the ROM initially was to
load instructions into a memory address dedicated only to running
the Amiga. Tim had no problems integrating the working operations
of the Amiga into his Tripos instructions.
Under direction from Rick Geiger of Commodore the team developing
the Amiga needed to meet the July 23rd 1985 launch date and Tim was
charged with achieving that date.
To complete his work he moved to California with his wife and used
hotel accommodation to further the OS. They used Sun Microsystems
workstations to produce the Amiga software.
Suffice to say Tim achieved his goal of providing a ready OS for
the Amiga by the launch date for the Amiga. The rest is history.
....... massively abridged. Had the weather been different. Don't
quote me on any of that. There are plenty of other sources on the
internet. So go fish.
Dr Tim King.
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