Dr Timothy James King, the programmer who ported the Cambridge-developed TRIPOS operating system to the Motorola 68000 processor, creating what became AmigaDOS, has died aged 70. His family said he passed away at the end of July, according to a report by AmigaNews. His rapid work adapting the system for prototype Amiga hardware allowed Commodore to launch the Amiga in 1985 after its own in-house operating system project had fallen badly behind schedule, giving him a hand in software eventually used by over two million people.

King ported TRIPOS, written by Dr Martin Richards in the BCPL language, from the DEC PDP-11 to the 68000 while at the University of Bath, later refining the work at Bristol firm MetaComCo before it was adopted for the Amiga. He integrated the BCPL-based code with Carl Sassenrath's Exec kernel and the Intuition windowing system, shaping AmigaDOS's command line and filesystem. He subsequently joined Perihelion, working on parallel computing for INMOS's Transputer and creating the Helios operating system, before going on to found early British ISP UK Online.