ArcInfo (formerly ARC/INFO) is a full-featured geographic information system produced by Esri, and is the highest level of licensing (and therefore functionality) in the ArcGIS Desktop product line.
The name refers to its architecture as a geographic information system composed of: The early releases of ARC/INFO comprised a set of FORTRAN programs linked together and accessed through a command-line interface built with the scripting language of the minicomputer (CPL on PRIMOS, DCL on VMS, etc.).
[citation needed] The release of ARC/INFO 4.0 included the advent of an "Arc executive" which processed commands with a new command-interpreter developed in FORTRAN and compiled for each platform, for performance and stability.
[citation needed] ESRI released a subset of ARC/INFO functionality as PC ARC/INFO for MS-DOS in 1987[3] and later a version for Windows using a dBase tables (instead of INFO) for tabular data and a 'Simple Macro Language' (SML).
[4] The ArcInfo license is billed by ESRI as "Professional GIS", allowing users the most flexibility and control in "all aspects of data building, modeling, analysis, and map display".