About ArcView and ESRI, Inc. About ArcView and ESRI, Inc.Disclaimer: the following is the author's own perspective on ESRI software, not that of ESRI itself. For the company's own line, consult the ESRI Web site.
ArcView comes from Environmental Research Systems, Inc., which is the world's leading producer of software for geographic information systems (GIS). ESRI create its major GIS product, Arc/Info, in the late 1960s for its own use and has been selling it since 1982. Arc/Info has become the most widely-used GIS software in the United States, and probably in the world. It has never been particularly user-friendly, as it relies largely on a command-line approach (as in MS-DOS and Unix operating systems). ESRI wrote ArcView to make GIS data and functions more accessible to general audiences.
ArcViewArcView does not do everything a major GIS package will do, but it works nicely with ESRI's major GIS product, Arc/Info. ArcView can read Arc/Info maps ("coverages") with no modification.
In general, ArcView is an excellent tool for viewing Arc/Info data and for working with database information that can be linked to map coverages. Many common database formats can be read, including dBASE, INFO (ESRI's own format), ASCII, and SQL-formatted tables from Oracle, Sybase, etc. Map layers can then be classified and symbols assigned based on data values.
ArcView has only rudimentary spatial analysis functions. ArcView cannot do two of the most fundamental GIS functions: overlay or buffering. Layers can be visually overlaid, but you cannot produce a new map layer based on the overlay.
ArcView has gradually been given more GIS functions. One rumor had ESRI abandoning the PC version of Arc/Info, which had languished for years behind the Unix version, in favor of an enhanced ArcView. ESRI has denied this and has produced a new PC version with Windows extensions, and is working on more upgradez. It may be counter to ESRI's marketing strategy to give ArcView too many GIS functions, since users may then abandon Arc/Info, an expensive product to buy and to maintain, for ArcView, which ESRI has priced fairly aggressively to compete with low-end GISs like MapInfo and Atlas GIS (which ESRI recently bought).
This tutorial covers version 3 of ArcView, released in late 1996, and the update, 3.1, released in 1998.
Version 2 of ArcView, released in October 1994, saw major change in the interface for ArcView. ArcView became much more like other Windows software (and less like some Mac and Unix software). The organizing files for AV 2, known as projects, appeared here, with .apr extensions in Windows versions. Unfortunately, version 2 software cannot read projects created by version 3.
Version 2.1 of ArcView, which was released in summer 1995, added the ability to read AutoCAD drawing (.DWG) files in their native format. This should provide interesting competition with AutoCAD add-on products like AutoCAD Map, Geo/SQL and ArcCAD, ESRI's own product.
A version of ArcView for viewing files only, called ArcExplorer, is now available free over the Internet, and can read ESRI shapefiles as well as ArcInfo coverages.
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