Frank Ostrowski and the Best BASICs

Turbo-BASIC XL and GFA BASIC

The Atari 8-bit computers came with a pretty good BASIC for the time. Unlike other BASICs it even had specific commands to take advantage of Atari features. But the BASIC was rather slow and it did not follow the Microsoft standard with the biggest omission being no string arrays.

Other BASICs had been created to address these problems and I’ve written about them before (see A BASIC Bonanza).

The Atari ST computers did not come with a BASIC at first, but the one that it did come with, ST BASIC, was absolutely terrible. Although it got some use at first, no one liked it.

But there were two BASICs, both developed by the same person, that became de facto standards of sorts. On the 8-bit Atari, it was Turbo-BASIC XL and on the ST it was GFA BASIC. Both were developed by Frank Ostrowski.

Mr. Ostrowski sadly passed in 2011, but his amazing versions of BASIC are a legacy still used by many people to this day.