Frank Ostrowski is a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 programmer.
After his time with the German Federal Armed Forces, Frank Ostrowski was unemployed for three years. During this time, he developed Turbo-Basic XL

Turbo-Basic XL

Turbo-Basic XL is an advanced version of BASIC for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. It is a compatible superset of the more common ATARI BASIC whose most important feature is the vastly improved execution speed...

 for the Atari 8-bit family

Atari 8-bit family

The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...

. It was published in the German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 Happy Computer Magazine in December 1985 (where it became Listing of the Month). Turbo-Basic XL was both much faster and superior to the existing ATARI BASIC

Atari BASIC

Atari BASIC is a BASIC interpreter for the Atari 8-bit family of 6502-based home computers. The interpreter originally shipped on an 8 KB cartridge; on later XL/XE model computers it was built in, with an option to disable it, and started when the machines were booted with no other cartridges...

.

He soon got a job with GFA Systemtechnik GmbH (at the time known as Integral Hydraulik) where he wrote GFA BASIC

GFA BASIC

GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language, by Frank Ostrowski. The first version was finished in 1986. In the mid and late 80s, it became very popular for the Atari ST homecomputer range . Later, ports for the Commodore Amiga, DOS and Windows were marketed...

 on the Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 which became one of the more popular BASICs on that platform.