had been a huge boon: since all the games were written in an intermediate language (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 IBM PC first, planning to write VMs for other platforms after the initial PC release. Reception When Cornerstone was released in 1985, it was widely hailed as a 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). 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. 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, though it had many built-in convenience functions, wasn't programmable. Some repetitive and complex tasks 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 was a boon in some ways, the most significant advantage of its use – easy portability – was no longer an issue. During Cornerstone's development, the IBM PC and its clones had emerged as the dominant business computer. While