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.

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.

After some deliberation, Infocom's board of directors decided to develop a relational database application for business users.

The leading database application of the day, dBase II, required complex command-line commands even for the simplest operations.

"[1]: 37  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).

One review noted that after waiting over three hours for a single text file to be imported, all similar benchmark tests were abandoned.

In 1985, the computer industry took a downturn and many businesses that may have been potential customers were reluctant or unable to justify the purchase of the program.

Their sales performance was not as good as projected and the revenue provided by games was not enough to cover the development costs of the database.