[reaperducer]

Having the users write their own queries reminds me of the old Infocom database.

Yes, that Infocom, if Zork fame.

After doing interactive fiction, it tried to use its parser to drive a database. Instead of “SELECT * FROM...” a user could write, “Show me all the people in London who own cats.”

[lowercased]

Cornerstone! The downfall of Infocom as we knew it... :/

[glaberficken]

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know the story. It's quite interesting.

Here's an excerpt from wikipedia:

"One development decision that proved fateful for the product—and the company as a whole—was the decision to make Cornerstone run via a virtual machine (VM). The use of Infocom's "Z-machine" for its interactive titles 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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_(software)

[lowercased]

i'd not known at the time that they did cornerstone with the zmachine approach as well. certainly in hindsight that seems a bad idea. i know that there weren't releases for anything except the pc market anyway, so reading this puts more of their problems in to perspective.