Aww. Well, cheers for the large number of hours I spent with my Amiga, Dr King. I actually went through a phase of stripping my Amiga back so it booted exclusively to amigaDOS, without the full 'desktop' windowing system available. (~ if I remember this rightly)..
Which was a foot-gun when I came back to it years later, turned it on and discovered I had forgotten everything I needed to know to get it to do anything anymore!
I ended up putting the pack together for a local isp for Amiga users, TCP / ppp and all that jazz. Back when isp's were crawling out of the woodwork all over the place :)
I worked for an ISP at the time, and was delighted to get to write a support page for Miami (a then-new TCP stack for Amiga), complete with config file downloads. Those were fun times.
How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.
I had never heard this name until now, but I owe Dr. Tim King a significant part of my career. Never having been a DOS user, AmigaDOS was my gateway drug to the command line interface, and to me learning the Linux CLI a few years later.
In 85 dad used a 680x0 Apollo workstation for CAD, and wanted something comparable to use at home. Between the Amiga and getting Levy's Hackers a few years later, the die was cast.
> Few people have heard of TripOS outside the Amiga market. As a standalone operating system it is unremarkable, however its relation to the AmigaOS makes it interesting. TripOS was developed at Cambridge University on an IBM 3081 (or an earlier IBM mainframe) running a locally-written OS called Phoenix during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The name is derived from the course description at the university. For example, it is possible to read for the mathematics tripos. It is also possible that the 'pos' suffix stood for Portable Operating System.
> At some point during the early 1980s Dr. Tim King ported the OS to the Motorola 68k. The operating system exists on a range of platform during this period, including the PDP11, DG Nova, 68000 (a homebrew 68k machine?), and the GA-16/220.
> The story continues at Commodore in 1984. They had recently bought the Amiga technology and were preparing it for a mainstream market. Development had fallen behind schedule, particularly in the development of the original operating system, dubbed CAOS. This prompted fears that Atari would beat them to the 16-bit market with their off-the-shelf ST range. In a series of meetings it was decided that an outside developer would be contracted to complete the task, abandoning large sections of the existing OS. MetaComCo were chosen as the contractor, as a result of their existing TripOS 68k port. It was a minor task to get the operating system to work on the Amiga prototypes, but required some time to get it to interact with Intuition.
> Reports of the time period indicate that the Los Gatos team, led by Jay Miner, were unhappy with the decision and openly criticised the end result. In particular, the TripOS/Intuition hybrid lacked many of the features they had planned (resource-tracking, etc.).
> A large portion of the TripOS code continued to exist in the Dos.Library, until it was replaced in v36 by a combination of assembler & C. However, the ghost of TripOS could not be exorcised and a small amount of the code lives on in the later AmigaOS releases to ensure compatibility.
> As most of you know, AmigaDOS was not the first choice for the top-level OS/DOS on the Amiga computer. What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos (developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by the TRIPOS Research Group, and converted with amazing speed by Metacomco's Dr. Tim King and his band of programmers). When the original, intended, designed-for-the-Amiga DOS failed to materialize (in what would no doubt be an interesting story in itself), the Amiga was launched with AmigaDOS, and the rest is history, so to speak.
> Carl Sassenrath made the following comment about CAOS at the AmiWest IRC conference: CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions.
Not many people like TRIPOS, or BCPL. It's an ugly language. However, it's thanks to Dr King's early '80s port of it to the 68000, that we even have the Amiga at all. The Amiga team had developed some excellent components of the OS, e.g. Exec as the central multitasking kernel, and Intuition for graphical interfaces, but they had contracted out work on the Amiga's DOS (e.g. the filesystem, loader, process management, command line interface, file APIs), asking them to create what they called CAOS (Commodore Amiga OS), and that totally failed. According to Carl Sassenrath, the contractors loved Unix and their Sun workstations too much and didn't want to hook up to the rest of the Amiga's OS. So they cut that company loose and started looking for an alternative. The existing 68000 port of TRIPOS saved the day, and let the Amiga launch when it did.
This is an interesting "what if" story. What if they pushed on with CAOS, would it have been awesome or would the Amiga never have existed as a commercial product. We will never know.
Amiga tcp+ppp and a shell account got me into unix. Had to compile my ppp slurp deamon on my shell account to get my amiga online. This was before ISP's became a thing. Thats how I rolled my unix knowledge into a sysadmin career. Good times
Yes it still exists and has development but it is only limping through the sludge on the back of existing retried developers. I could be wrong.
> King joined MetaComCo and brought Tripos with him to the company.
Those days where if you designed or created something, you could pitch it.
Now with the era of Ai, "Look at what I made boss with just a paragraph of words!" doesn't hold the same upper-class. I never got to play with the Amiga, but I knew how awesome it sounded like to use. Chiptunes.
My story is that my aunt was an IT college tech and used to hand us floppy discs of games when my parents made regular trips to my grandparents back in 1995. She gave me a postage-bag full of floppy discs inside, they were all Amiga games, never got to play them. Unfortunately, we had Pentium.
Aww. Well, cheers for the large number of hours I spent with my Amiga, Dr King. I actually went through a phase of stripping my Amiga back so it booted exclusively to amigaDOS, without the full 'desktop' windowing system available. (~ if I remember this rightly)..
Which was a foot-gun when I came back to it years later, turned it on and discovered I had forgotten everything I needed to know to get it to do anything anymore!
I ended up putting the pack together for a local isp for Amiga users, TCP / ppp and all that jazz. Back when isp's were crawling out of the woodwork all over the place :)
I worked for an ISP at the time, and was delighted to get to write a support page for Miami (a then-new TCP stack for Amiga), complete with config file downloads. Those were fun times.
How do you actually do that? I ran mine for years with a single, borderless full screen CLI window but that hardly disabled the windowing system, you could still run GUI apps.
My recollection too was while you didn't need Workbench itself, windowing and the multi screen support was all ROM based and always there.
I had never heard this name until now, but I owe Dr. Tim King a significant part of my career. Never having been a DOS user, AmigaDOS was my gateway drug to the command line interface, and to me learning the Linux CLI a few years later.
Thank you, Dr. King!
In 85 dad used a 680x0 Apollo workstation for CAD, and wanted something comparable to use at home. Between the Amiga and getting Levy's Hackers a few years later, the die was cast.
I knew him as the founder of UK Online - only met him a few times but he seems a really friendly, helpful guy. Sorry to hear of his passing
interview from October 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-szurM5VY
*corrected date
R.I.P. !
https://web.archive.org/web/20131016145634/http://www.amigah...
> Few people have heard of TripOS outside the Amiga market. As a standalone operating system it is unremarkable, however its relation to the AmigaOS makes it interesting. TripOS was developed at Cambridge University on an IBM 3081 (or an earlier IBM mainframe) running a locally-written OS called Phoenix during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The name is derived from the course description at the university. For example, it is possible to read for the mathematics tripos. It is also possible that the 'pos' suffix stood for Portable Operating System.
> At some point during the early 1980s Dr. Tim King ported the OS to the Motorola 68k. The operating system exists on a range of platform during this period, including the PDP11, DG Nova, 68000 (a homebrew 68k machine?), and the GA-16/220.
> The story continues at Commodore in 1984. They had recently bought the Amiga technology and were preparing it for a mainstream market. Development had fallen behind schedule, particularly in the development of the original operating system, dubbed CAOS. This prompted fears that Atari would beat them to the 16-bit market with their off-the-shelf ST range. In a series of meetings it was decided that an outside developer would be contracted to complete the task, abandoning large sections of the existing OS. MetaComCo were chosen as the contractor, as a result of their existing TripOS 68k port. It was a minor task to get the operating system to work on the Amiga prototypes, but required some time to get it to interact with Intuition.
> Reports of the time period indicate that the Los Gatos team, led by Jay Miner, were unhappy with the decision and openly criticised the end result. In particular, the TripOS/Intuition hybrid lacked many of the features they had planned (resource-tracking, etc.).
> A large portion of the TripOS code continued to exist in the Dos.Library, until it was replaced in v36 by a combination of assembler & C. However, the ghost of TripOS could not be exorcised and a small amount of the code lives on in the later AmigaOS releases to ensure compatibility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190420095854/http://www.thule....
> As most of you know, AmigaDOS was not the first choice for the top-level OS/DOS on the Amiga computer. What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos (developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by the TRIPOS Research Group, and converted with amazing speed by Metacomco's Dr. Tim King and his band of programmers). When the original, intended, designed-for-the-Amiga DOS failed to materialize (in what would no doubt be an interesting story in itself), the Amiga was launched with AmigaDOS, and the rest is history, so to speak.
> Carl Sassenrath made the following comment about CAOS at the AmiWest IRC conference: CAOS was contracted out, for the most part, to a company that felt Unix was a better choice and didn't buy into my design. They became history when they started using their Sun development systems for other projects, not the Amiga higher level OS functions.
Not many people like TRIPOS, or BCPL. It's an ugly language. However, it's thanks to Dr King's early '80s port of it to the 68000, that we even have the Amiga at all. The Amiga team had developed some excellent components of the OS, e.g. Exec as the central multitasking kernel, and Intuition for graphical interfaces, but they had contracted out work on the Amiga's DOS (e.g. the filesystem, loader, process management, command line interface, file APIs), asking them to create what they called CAOS (Commodore Amiga OS), and that totally failed. According to Carl Sassenrath, the contractors loved Unix and their Sun workstations too much and didn't want to hook up to the rest of the Amiga's OS. So they cut that company loose and started looking for an alternative. The existing 68000 port of TRIPOS saved the day, and let the Amiga launch when it did.
This is an interesting "what if" story. What if they pushed on with CAOS, would it have been awesome or would the Amiga never have existed as a commercial product. We will never know.
A lot of things went right just by pure chance in the beginning of Amiga’s history.
Sadly that luck reversed later.
Amiga tcp+ppp and a shell account got me into unix. Had to compile my ppp slurp deamon on my shell account to get my amiga online. This was before ISP's became a thing. Thats how I rolled my unix knowledge into a sysadmin career. Good times
Dr. Tim King, thanks for introducing real computers to me, in the form of Amiga.
Same! AmigaDOS (based on TRIPOS) was the first OS with a "real" command line that I used. It was also where I learned C.
The Amiga was an awesome machine. And the OS was part of the reason it was able to deliver such good video.
You could develop real C programs. Partially thanks to AmigaDOS.
May his memory be a blessing
RIP, still own an Amiga 500! Thank you sir.
Sad to hear. Met him a few times. The company I worked for and his (Perihelion) partnered on a few projects.
Sad, a legacy that can't be replaced.
Yes it still exists and has development but it is only limping through the sludge on the back of existing retried developers. I could be wrong.
> King joined MetaComCo and brought Tripos with him to the company.
Those days where if you designed or created something, you could pitch it.
Now with the era of Ai, "Look at what I made boss with just a paragraph of words!" doesn't hold the same upper-class. I never got to play with the Amiga, but I knew how awesome it sounded like to use. Chiptunes.
My story is that my aunt was an IT college tech and used to hand us floppy discs of games when my parents made regular trips to my grandparents back in 1995. She gave me a postage-bag full of floppy discs inside, they were all Amiga games, never got to play them. Unfortunately, we had Pentium.
My condolences.
Thanks for everything. Mr. King. Rest in peace.
Truly a King. Requiescat in pace.
say "RIP"