Cornerstone (software)

Cornerstone is a relational database for MS-DOS released by Infocom, a company best known in the 1980s for developing interactive fiction video games. Initially hailed upon release in 1985 for its ease of use, a series of shortcomings and changes in the market kept Cornerstone from achieving success. It is considered a key factor in Infocom's demise. but to develop business products. Before forming the company, several of the founders had created the game Zork on mainframes while attending or working at MIT. When they joined to form Infocom, Zork was a natural choice as a first product because it was practically complete and didn't require much up-front funding. The enormous success of the game and its sequels (which were actually the other portions of the original mainframe game, which had been split into pieces that early personal computers could handle) led to the development of more interactive titles, due in large part to the highly portable technology the company developed for intelligent parsing.

Despite the success of its game titles, the original founders of Infocom were still intent on developing business products, which sold for much more than games. Lotus Development, located in the same Cambridge, Massachusetts building as Infocom, debuted Lotus 1-2-3 in January 1983; the spreadsheet was immediately successful, and Lotus's sales were more than eight times as much that year as Infocom's. After deliberation, Infocom's board of directors decided to develop a relational database application for business users.

Infocom's use of a VM affected 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. One review noted that after waiting over three hours for a single text file to be imported, all similar benchmark tests were abandoned.

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