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Cornerstone is a relational database for the PC released by Infocom in 1985. It was widely hailed upon its release for its ease of use, but eventually led to the demise of the company due to several significant failings.
History and development
In the 1980s, Infocom was widely-known as a computer game developer and publisher. It developed the most popular text adventures available at the time and, in fact, can be considred a pioneer of the genre.
However, the developers only considered games as a "jumping off" point for their company. The original founders of the company originally wanted to do "serious" product development. They developed their first product, Zork, a game, simply because the developers who produced it for I.O.U.'s--it didn't require any up-front funding. Its eventual success led to the development of more interactive titles, due in large part to the technology the company developed for intelligent parsing. Despite the overwhelming success of its numerous game titles, the original founders of Infocom were still intent on developing serious titles. In addition to their original intent, the founders saw business titles as more lucrative than game titles since they could charge more for each copy. After some deliberation, they decided on developing a relational database application for business users.
Database applications at the time of Cornerstone's original development were fairly inaccessible to non-programmers. The leading database application of the day, dBase II, required complex command-line commands even for the simplest operations. The Cornerstone developers were determined to make ease-of-use their chief priority.
While development of Cornerstone was going well, it required an enormous amount of capital as more and more programmers were required for all the work. Infocom borrowed heavily and used a sole source ofa venture capital. Profits from their interactive fiction titles were diverged into help fund Cornerstone, a move that disturbed employees of the game division.
One development decision that proved fateful for the product--and the company as a whole--was the decision to make Cornerstone run via a virtual machine (V.M.). The use of Infocom's "Z-machine" for its interactive titles was a huge boon: since all the games were written in an intermediate lanuage (called ZIL), the company could release one title for every major platform simultaneously. The developers hoped to do the same for Cornerstone and its subsequent products. The existing VM proved unsuitable for the database application, so a new one was written for the product. The developers produced the VM for the PC first, planning to write VMs for other platforms after the initial PC release.
When Cornerstone was released in 1985, it was widely hailed as a minumental giant leap forward in usability. All commands were menu-driven: an innovative feature at the time. Many powerful features never before seen were available, such as command-completion and context-sensitive help. One PC Week columnist wrote, "Cornerstone is the best program I have ever used... the program is so easy to use, explaining its use is almost redundant. If you need a relational database, buy Cornerstone." One significant achievement noted by reviewers was that Infocom was able to contain the entire program on one floppy disk, a bonus provided by their use of their custom virtual machine (in addition to other facilities, it compressed text).
However, Infocom's use of a VM impacted performance. For simple operations, Cornerstone's performance was fine. However, for intensive operations, such as importing text files and sorting, Cornerstone dragged, especially when compared to the dominant database available at the time of Cornerstone's release, dBase III.
Additionally, users of dBase III, despite needing to use complex command-line commands, were able to repurpose databases for whatever uses they needed. They could even make stand-alone applications which used databases with the package. Macros could also be developed which automated many complex or repetitive tasks. Cornerstone, however, though it had many built-in convenience functions, wasn't programmable. Many repetetive and complex tasks--few as there were--needed to be carried out by hand. Also, any operations on its databases needed to be carried out within the application; Cornerstone had no facilities for creating stand-alone specially-purposed applications.
While Infocom's use of a VM were a boon in some ways, the most significant advantage of its use--easy portability--was no longer an issue. During Cornerstone's development, the PC had emerged as the dominant business computer. While the product was released for the PC platform, its slow operation due to the VM use was too great a disadvantage compared to other current offerings.
These failings may not have proved fatal were it not for the climate in which the product was released. In 1985, the computer industry took a serious downturn and many consumers and businesses that may have been potential customers were reluctant or unable to justify the purchase of the program. Cornerstone sold just 10,000 copies. Again, this may not have even proved lethal to the company had game sales remained strong. Though the titles continued to sell, but the downturn had also effected their sales. Their sales performance was not as good as projected and the revenue provided by them was not enough to cover the development costs of the database. Though the company's revenue for the year was over a million dollars (US currency), it was far short of what was needed to keep the company solvent.
In 1986, Infocom was acquired by Activision, a large developer and publisher. Activision paid off Infocom's outstanding debt as part of the deal. However, the acquisition, while keeping the company afloat for a few more years, also eventually proved fatal and Activision shut down Infocom in 1989.
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