GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski. The name is derived from the company ("GFA Systemtechnik GmbH", in Kiel and Düsseldorf), which distributed the software. GFA is an acronym for "Gesellschaft für Automatisierung" ("Company for Automatization"). The first version was released in 1986. In the mid and late 1980s it became very popular for the Atari ST home computer range, since the Atari ST BASIC shipped with them was more primitive.