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  • I worked with Tim as part of the founding team at UK Online, from an old brewery in the middle of the Mendips in Somerset.

    I learned a lot in those three years in Shepton Mallet, as we kept pivoting to ride the wave of the early commercial internet. It's good to think that part of what we built back then is still here, now the consumer parts of Sky Broadband. I believe they still use that old brewery for customer support.

    Downstairs from our space were the Perihelion folks, who were working on building VR systems on top of transputers Now that was fun...

    That team all went its separate ways over the years, but many of us are still in touch.

    by sbisson
  • Dr. Tim King, thanks for introducing real computers to me, in the form of Amiga.
    by vardump
  • interview from October 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-szurM5VY

    *corrected date

    by muyuu
  • 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
    by Angostura
  • 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.

    by doublerabbit
  • 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!

    by Cockbrand
  • 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 :)

    by alienbaby
  • I dropped out of a decidedly average university to do customer support for the first ISP in Australia. After a couple of years of that, I got itchy feet and found myself in London, England. The plan was to follow the footsteps of many thousands of Australians before me, and get a job in a bar (note: I had zero experience in bar work), and get enough money to hang out in London for a while, and maybe do some side trips into Europe.

    It was '96 or '97, and the dotcom boom was just getting started. Deciding to try my luck, I picked up one of the trade papers to look at the job listings. I bought myself a suit at Marks and Spencers and jumped on a tube to go to my first job interview. I took the tube home, and by the time I got to the other end I had a message waiting for me saying I got the job.

    I found myself reporting to the brilliant Jack Lang (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/farewell-jack-lang), tweaking software developed by Tim King's company, Perihelion. I really was just making minor tweaks to a bunch of perl scripts, so I managed to stumble through it and not make a total fool of myself. Even though I was working with folks with extremely impressive bodies of work behind them and I was just some scruffy backpacker dude, they were always kind and generous to me. I met some great people there.

    I never did get a chance to learn how to pour a beer.

    by goatforce5

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