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From: "Ben A L Jemmett" <bal.jemmett@ukonline.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Cornerstone (was Re: [Inform][GLUX inform] IMPORTANT MESSAGE!)
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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 19:28:48 GMT
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"Jim Nelson" <jim_nelson@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.16f0b095dd18353998968e@news.mindspring.com...
> This brings up something I've been meaning to ask for a while now.  Has
> anyone out there actually used Cornerstone?  Was its strength -- or
> presumed strength -- simply its natural-language parser?

I've used it; my father bought a copy to look after genealogical data, and I
had a fiddle with it on several occasions.  It's strength was that is was
incredibly flexible and easy to use -- the user interface was a menu at the
top of the screen (1-2-3 like), but you could type and it'd narrow down your
choices based on that.  Queries would usually be something like:

[from main menu]
VIEW <file> [ok]
SELECT BY-FORM [ok]
<fill in any relevant fields on the form that's presented>
DONE [ok]

.... or run a saved query/report, or just VIEW the file in its entirety.
Relational data was easy to set up, as were subrecords -- something I rather
miss now I use Oracle and wrote a front-end app to store the data
Cornerstone would handle out of the box.

The disadvantages were that it wasn't designed for network use, it was
rather slow (due to the fact it ran in a VM, although the PC has become
predominant in te market by the time it launched), and it didn't support any
programming.  At the original release price, only people who would hire a
database consultant and use dBase would be interested, and it didn't have
that much flexibility.  At the later $99 price, though, it was great for
novice users.  I'm not sure if it's Y2K compliant -- I'm guessing no, but
the manual's on a shelf at home.  I can't fire it up on this machine; it
worked fine on my old P133 with 240MB and later 2.8GB of HDD, but this is a
dual PIII-800 with 36GB, and I just get 'Abnormal exit:
vector/tuple FALSE' when I VIEW a file.  Perhaps I'll try it in a Win98
VMware session.

Oh, and the fact it was released by Infocom didn't help -- at the time, I
couldn't work out why the people who wrote Cornerstone were selling games,
because I'd seen Cornerstone first.  People who were paying attention to
such things, though, might have been uneasy buying business apps from a
games company.
--
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)


