GFA BASIC

GFA BASIC is a proprietary dialect of the BASIC programming language that was especially popular on the Atari ST in the late 1980s. Frank Ostrowski developed it at GFA Systemtechnik GmbH, later GFA Software, a German company in Kiel and Dusseldorf, as a commercial version of his free BASIC implementation Turbo-Basic XL. The company name comes from Gesellschaft fur Automatisierung, meaning company for automation. The first version was released in 1986. It spread because the BASIC that shipped with the Atari ST was far more primitive, and ports followed for the Amiga, MS-DOS and Windows. Version 2.0 was the most popular release, and version 3.0 added user-defined structures and other aggregate data types. The final released version was 3.6, and around 2002 GFA Software ended all activity and closed its mailing list and website in 2005, after which the user community took over support. Some printed manuals were produced in black ink on red paper to discourage photocopying. Notable uses include the game editor that Eric Chahi wrote to build Another World and the editing tools Karsten Koper of Thalion Software made for the Amberstar series.