Corner Stone

A database I used in the early 80s that ran on a twin floppy PC. Written by Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson

Wonderful features were:

It stored user-defined names separately from internal IDs, so you could change the names of tables and fields without worrying.
Fantastic date handling - you could enter "Next Wednesday" and it would work out the date.
No Table/View separation, you could define a field on a table as being calculated on fields from a related table and that definition became part of the original table.

It had limitations - no programming language and strictly single user and a 80 * 25 character interface.

I've never found anything quite so good for putting together simple Db applications. I did a petty cash system in 3 hours.

Has anyone else used this? Any idea what happened to it? -- AndyMorris

Interesting historical point: CornerStone was by InfoCom, the same people who brought you Zork, DeadLine? and HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy.

It seems that, despite it being an InsanelyGreat product, it died.

Feb 86 Price cut for "Cornerstone" (from $495 to $99.95).

It really is the best end-user Db I have ever come across, by a long way.

What happened to Cornerstone? - Sounds like they were a little ahead of their time.

It sent InfoCom bust. Two reasons I think.

InfoCom were known as a games company so no-one took cornerstone seriously.
It fell between two stools. It was a bit costly ($499) for personal use and needed relational thinking to get the most out of it. It also was strictly single user and non-programmable. Although it dealt very well with relational stuff, queries, master/detail screens and reports, you couldn't make a turnkey application out of it. It later sold for $49 and once you got the hang of it, allowed you to build quite complex apps very quickly.

When faced with MS Access or Oracle Forms, I still find myself thinking "This would be so much easier in Cornerstone."

I know the feeling. In the 1980s, I used PRO-IV, a database/4GL, and developed many large robust commercial applications with a minimum of fuss and bother.

When faced with MS Access, I still find myself thinking "This would be so much easier in PRO-IV".

Unlike Cornerstone, PRO-IV is still around (as a _very_ expensive programming environment for use with e.g. Oracle). But fifteen years of being acquired by different companies, and being hacked around by people who don't understand it, has robbed it of its elegance and its purpose. It's a mere shadow of its former self.

Why did great ideas like those in Cornerstone and PRO-IV die out? I think it's because there were some really trashy 4GLs around during the 1980s, which gave a bad name to the whole genre of database productivity tools.

I knew the Cornerstone/PRO-IV genre was on the way out when I saw pedestrian and inelegant products like dBase becoming successful in the second half of the 1980s.

PRO-IV ran respectably on an IBM XT. And, unlike much modern software, it never once crashed on me. The main executable was all of 250kB of finely-crafted C and assembler.

Take a look at UniFace? (available from Compuware). This is a platform / database independent 4GL for Client Server & Web Development.

Very easy to use English-like syntax. It is now a component and model based development tool. It's still a bit expensive, but you get what you pay for.

The whole idea of user databases seems to have died, probably because people thought that if you got rid of the need for programming, users would find it easy to set up their own databases.

They were still left with the need to analyse and design; this was hand-waved over by the marketing people in the push to flog the products.

Professional developers tended to prefer code-based solutions because they were better for producing turnkey solutions and provided better customer lock-in.

Code-based products also allow coders to keep closer to their own paradigm; they remain in control of the user.

A user-based DB demands that you grok the idea and get your analysis and design right; you can't cover a lousy design up with lots of messy code.

I like Access as a lightweight DB back-end for VB components, but as a user Db it sucks. I've not done much with Dbase but what I did do left me with the impression that it was barely better than Cobol and Isam files; maybe I didn't really get it. -- AndyMorris

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