🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

As the door swings open you are blinded by intense light and incredible pain. Just before everything overloads and you fade from existence, you can make out a shape outside, holding onto the door of the cylinder, and then everything goes dark.

-- Suspended

Factoid of the day

For most Infocom games, the packaging and "feelies" were designed to complement the story. For Wishbringer, though, the packaging was conceptualized before the game. Brian Moriarty reasoned that a magic ring or a glowing stone would make a great "feelie" to include in a game box. His peers thought it was a great idea, too, so he began developing Wishbringer, a story about a glowing magical stone.

Link of the day

Zarf Updates

IF author Andrew Plotkin's blog about all things IF.

If you have an Infocom, interactive fiction, or adventure game link you'd like to see here, let me know.

Why Business Products?

Paul DiLascia

When the editor asked me to write an article explaining why Infocom has ventured into business products, I thought: Hmmph. Why business products, indeed! I could just as well ask, why games?

Nevertheless, this question often arises in the minds of Infocom fans when they learn that Infocom — famous for its best-selling games, producer of a whole genre of interactive fiction, and home of Floyd — has now introduced Cornerstone, its first business software product.

They want to know what's going on. Business software? Does everyone at Infocom now wear a blue pinstriped suit and read the Wall Street Journal every morning? Have we finally lost our marbles — or maybe we've transcended even ourselves? After all, business is serious, stuffy, boring.

So I accepted the challenge, hoping to dispel some of these illusions.

We began developing Cornerstone in 1982, over two years ago. Infocom's strategy all along was to compete in the business arena. We just didn't tell anyone. We knew Infocom's software technology could be applied successfully to business products as well as to games.

The games are sophisticated programs as far as software goes. Writing a program that can respond intelligently to an arbitrary verbalization is no easy task. Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Joel Berez designed a special high-level language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) and an entire development system just so they could write large, complex game programs that would fit on small microcomputers. It's this technology that gives Infocom an edge over its competition.

A similar technology was developed to produce Cornerstone, our new database system. It too is written in a specialized high-level language, and it too is a very sophisticated program. Cornerstone comprises over 75,000 lines of code. Some claim it's the biggest program ever put on a single floppy disk. To write Cornerstone in assembly language would be a Herculean task, not worth attempting by sane mortals. As it is, it took a staff of programmers over two years to write Cornerstone.

Cornerstone shares another important quality with our interactive fiction. And that's its emphasis on you, the intrepid player (called, in business circles, the user). Cornerstone makes you the architect of your own database and allows you to manipulate information the way you want. Cornerstone is designed for its users.

In developing Cornerstone, we've tried at every step to anticipate what a sane (or insane) person might attempt to do next. There's a critical difference, however, between Cornerstone and the games. While the games strive to make life difficult — constantly thwarting your best efforts, posing enigmas, even leaving you dead in some remote wasteland — in Cornerstone, we've done everything we can think of to make things easy. You'll never need InvisiClues to use Cornerstone, because we've given it a HELP key which supplies hints and suggestions that are so apropos, it's like having a wise friend always near.

Brian Berkowitz — *Brian "Spike" Berkowitz: "We pick the hardest thing to do — and then we implement it."*

There are other differences, too. When people first play — I mean use — Cornerstone, they sometimes ask why we didn't use a natural language interface as in our games. The answer is this: Natural language is inherently ambiguous, and ambiguity is just what you don't want in a database. The equivocation that adds humor and wit to the games would make Cornerstone a nightmare to use. If you told your database "Show me all the letters from Fred," you probably wouldn't be amused if it responded, "F, R, E, D." At Infocom, we believe in using the right interface for the task at hand.

As to the claim that business products are dull, I point out in defense that different people have different ideas about what's fun. Some folks spends their time manipulating bits of information they call "price-earning ratios" and "bond equivalent yields"; others like to keep track of every last X-Men issue in their Marvel Comics collection. Still others delight in comparing tasting notes for different vintages of Mouton Rothschild. Judging from the early responses, people like these will be pleased with Cornerstone. Some testers have told us Cornerstone is what they've sought for years. Some even claim it's fun!

At Infocom, our idea of fun is producing sophisticated, quality software products that erode the barriers between people and computers. It's what we do best. Cornerstone continues the tradition. That's why we made it.

Yet I fear there remain some unsatisfied skeptics who continue to wonder, "Why business products?" For them, I leave this quote from Brian Berkowitz, one of the prime movers of Cornerstone: "We pick the hardest thing to do — and then we implement it."

This article appeared in
New Zork Times, The
Jan-Mar 1985

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.