FranzBasic

FranzBasic (also written Franz Basic or Franz-Basic) was a structured BASIC dialect for MS-DOS from the small German software house Zimmer Informatik in Düsseldorf. It was announced in autumn 1989 and reviewed as version 1.0 in early 1990. It was not a general-purpose rival to QuickBASIC or Turbo Basic. It was aimed at a narrower market: programmers who wrote database applications and technical or scientific programs on IBM PC compatibles. Its unusual features were dBase file commands built into the language itself, a full-screen editor you could use with a mouse and pull-down menus, and a runtime module that let users give compiled programs to people who did not own FranzBasic.

FranzBasic is one of the many regional BASICs of the late DOS era that are now almost forgotten. Very little about it survives online. This page is based mainly on contemporary German magazine coverage, scanned at the Internet Archive.

History & Origins

The 1989 announcement

The first known mention of FranzBasic is a short news item in the October 1989 issue of the German PC magazine DOS International. Under the headline “Franzbasic: Basic der 90er Jahre” (“the BASIC of the 90s”), it reported that Zimmer Informatik planned to bring out a BASIC compiler called Franzbasic, probably in the autumn of that year. The plans were ambitious:

• versions for MS-DOS, OS/2 and all common Unix systems
• a structured language with while ... wend and repeat ... until
• support for high-resolution EGA and VGA graphics
• commands to create and process dBase-compatible databases
• commands to read spreadsheet data from Lotus 1-2-3, Symphony and Excel
• an integrated editor and debugger, fast background translation, and syntax checking while you type
• an introductory price of 149 marks for the MS-DOS version

What actually shipped

The product that DOS International reviewed in March 1990, Franz Basic 1.0, was more modest than that. It cost 99 marks, ran under MS-DOS, and its vendor was given as “Franz Zimmer Informatik, 4000 Düsseldorf 1”. The reviewers noted that, “because of the technical-scientific target group”, Franz Basic had no graphics commands. That contradicts the EGA/VGA support in the announcement. We found no contemporary source showing that the planned OS/2 or Unix versions, or the spreadsheet commands, were ever released.

The name

The vendor line in the March 1990 review reads “Franz Zimmer Informatik”, and the same issue prints a reader’s joke “eingesandt von Franz Zimmer” (sent in by Franz Zimmer). The product name may come from a person named Franz Zimmer, but no source we found says so directly. A later German BASIC FAQ (Thomas Antoni’s QBasic FAQ, 2002) calls FranzBasic a compiler “of the magazine DOS International (Franzis-Verlag)”. That attribution does not hold up. DOS International was published by DMV Daten- und Medien Verlag, not Franzis, and the 1989 and 1990 articles both name Zimmer Informatik as the developer.

Design Philosophy

FranzBasic’s design followed from its audience. QuickBASIC and Turbo Basic aimed for broad GW-BASIC compatibility. FranzBasic instead added commands for the work its users actually did and accepted that portability would suffer. The 1990 review says plainly that programs written in GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC or Turbo Basic often would not run under Franz Basic without changes, and that the reverse was also true once a program used Franz Basic’s own commands.

The language followed the late-1980s move towards structured BASIC. In the review’s words, “line numbers are a foreign word to Franz Basic”. It offered if, for, while and repeat constructs that “practically invite structured programming”, and still kept the traditional goto and gosub.

Key Features

Built-in database commands

The most distinctive part of FranzBasic was database access built into the language. Programs could open and work with dBase and dBase-compatible files through ordinary statements. The review names these commands:

Shareware vendors’ adverts from 1990 add that it worked directly with dBase III data files (.dbf) and index files (.ndx).

User-interface commands

The review’s table of typical commands lists several text-mode user-interface statements that other BASIC dialects of the time lacked:

The 1990 shareware adverts also mention menu programming and selection boxes (“Auswahlboxen”).

The development environment

FranzBasic came with a full-screen editor that worked with either the mouse or the keyboard. Functions were reached through pull-down menus or key combinations, “so that everyone can use the editor as they prefer”. The shareware listings also mention an autosave feature. The German manual was praised for being clearly organised, with examples and explanations for every command.

The runtime-module model

The 1990 review says Franz Basic was not a full compiler in the sense that QuickBASIC and Turbo Basic were. It did not produce standalone .EXE files. It produced a runtime module that was run from the DOS prompt with the supplied program RUNFB.EXE. That module could be passed on to anyone, so developers could distribute their programs to users who did not have Franz Basic. The review listed the dependence on the runtime among its negatives.

Sources disagree on how to describe it. The 2002 Antoni FAQ says FranzBasic “can generate EXE files”. DOS International called it a “Basic-Compiler” in 1989 and a “Franz-Basic-Interpreter” in December 1990. The shareware adverts called it a “BASIC-Übersetzer” (BASIC translator). The detailed hands-on 1990 review is the most reliable description: source is translated to an intermediate form, and a separate runtime program executes it.

Evolution

WinBasic

FranzBasic’s design continued in WinBasic, also from Zimmer Informatik, for Microsoft Windows. In June 1991 the German disk magazine D-E-R described WinBasic as a compiler that runs under Windows, handles dBase-compatible data, and produces intermediate code executed by a runtime module. It added: “Incidentally, it is a further development of the shareware compiler FRANZ-BASIC”.

The Spanish magazine PC Soft reviewed WinBasic in its October 1991 issue. The model was the same as FranzBasic’s. The editor’s Run option could save a compiled .COD file, which a separate runtime, RUNWINB.EXE, executed. Zimmer Informatik allowed that runtime to be redistributed free of charge with users’ programs. The editor also had an autosave option. A sample program printed in the review shows the message box text “WinBasic (c) 1990 Zimmer Informatik”. WinBasic 1.2 was still listed in a 1996 Visual Basic developer’s toolkit directory, with Zimmer Informatik at a Düsseldorf post-office box.

Shareware distribution

By spring 1990 FranzBasic was sold through German shareware mail-order catalogues: disk #1014, 12 marks, described as a “complete, very fast BASIC development system”. By June 1991 it was also in American shareware listings as disk PB 192 in Computer Monthly. It is not clear from these sources whether Zimmer Informatik moved the product to shareware deliberately or released a separate shareware edition next to the 99-mark retail version.

Current Relevance

FranzBasic is a historical product. We found no evidence of any release after version 1.0, any surviving official website, a source code release, or a modern port. Thomas Antoni’s German QBasic FAQ still described it in 2002, and the EDM2 wiki lists “FranzBasic” among DOS BASIC compilers with no further detail. No Docker image or maintained distribution exists.

Why It Matters

FranzBasic is a good example of something common in European microcomputing around 1990: small local vendors building specialist BASIC dialects for particular jobs instead of competing with Microsoft and Borland on compatibility. It combined ideas that were usually found in separate products at the time: database statements built into the language, as in the xBase world of dBase and Clipper; a mouse-driven IDE; text-mode dialogs and menus, which Microsoft later offered through the text-mode forms of Visual Basic for DOS (1992); and a freely redistributable runtime instead of native executables. There is no evidence that FranzBasic influenced any of those products. It shows how a one-company BASIC could serve a narrow market of database and technical programmers, then carry its design forward into a Windows product, WinBasic.

Sources and Verification Notes

• DOS International 10/1989, news item “Franzbasic: Basic der 90er Jahre” (Internet Archive dos-international_1989-10).
• DOS International 3/1990, review “Franz Basic 1.0” (Internet Archive dos-international_1990-03).
• DOS International 4/1990-6/1990 and mc 4/1990, shareware mail-order adverts for FranzBasic disk #1014.
• DOS International 12/1990, shareware feature mentioning the “Franz-Basic-Interpreter”.
• Computer Monthly, June 1991, shareware listing PB 192.
• D-E-R Disc EDV Report 6/1991, BASIC course introduction describing WinBasic as a further development of FRANZ-BASIC.
• PC Soft (Spain) no. 30, October 1991, WinBasic review.
• Thomas Antoni, QBasic Monster FAQ, “Welche BASIC-Sprachen gibt es für den PC?” (2002).

Not verified: the exact month FranzBasic 1.0 first shipped (the only bounds are the October 1989 “expected in autumn” notice and the March 1990 review), whether any version after 1.0 existed, the origin of the name, and whether the announced OS/2 and Unix versions were ever produced. The encyclopedia master list gives 1985, but we found no source that mentions FranzBasic before 1989. The list’s “Systems” category also fits poorly, since every contemporary source describes a database and application language.