The Amiga
was an innovative home computer, originally built and designed by a group
of talented people at Amiga Corporation. This company was acquired by Commodore
in 1984, who themselves had been instrumental in the spread of home computers
with the original PET, the VIC-20
and later the hugely successful Commodore64.
The Amiga company was bought for their new design which was seen as the successor
the 64. Commodore went bust, passed the remains on to Escom who also went bust,
had a strange period owned by Gateway2000 and
is now owned by small independent company Amiga
Inc in Snoqualmie, WA, USA. There remains a hugely vibrant Amiga
User's community.
Tim King was responsible for bringing to the Amiga an operating system that
he had been working on at Cambridge University called Tripos. This was a fully
pre-emptive multi-tasking system written almost entirely in the programming
language BCPL (a
precursor to C). Tim worked with the team at Amiga who had already produced
a kernel, and moved Tripos on top of this. Others in the team produced device
drivers and the award-winning graphics and user interface.
Tim is one of the few people in the UK at that time who had more than 2 million people
use his software.
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