Abstract: The paper first reviews in detail the history of the CAD industry development in the last four decades. It can be seen from the review that, in the past 40 years, great progresses have been made to CAD technologies, and CAD industry has experienced remarkable changes. The adoption of CAD in manufacturing industries has accelerated the development of these industries. It is concluded from the history review that the rapid development of computational environments, the extensive industrial application needs and the evolvement of CAD technologies are the three key forces that had driven and will continue to drive the advancement of CAD industry. Lessons learnt from the history are also presented at the end of this paper, which, we hope, may help us to improve our domestic CAD industry.