ABSTRACT
The evolution of the GIS has been a rapid and complex one in the last decade. The late 1970s marked the end of the local, hand-crafted GIS and the advent of the first, truly operational, turnkey systems. The most successful of these commercial systems in the late 1980s has clearly been ARC/INFO (a product of ESRI of Redlands, California). This software system can now be found in thousands of installations on a world-wide basis (as of mid-1989, over three hundred of these are in colleges and universities). ARC/INFO has derived its wide-spread popularity from both its initial power (as contrasted to the other commercial systems of the late 1970s) and the explicit decision by ESRI to make it available on a wide range of platforms which now range from large mainframe computers to workstations to PCs.
