Besides being used in a wide range of industries from aerospace and defence to packaging design, CATIA has been used by architect Frank Gehry to design some of his signature curvilinear buildings[2] and his company Gehry Technologies was developing their Digital Project software based on CATIA.

[citation needed] CATIA started as an in-house development in 1977 by French aircraft manufacturer Avions Marcel Dassault to provide 3D surface modeling and numerical control functions for the CADAM software they used at that time[4] to develop the Mirage fighter jet.

Initially named CATI (conception assistée tridimensionnelle interactive – French for interactive aided three-dimensional design), it was renamed CATIA in 1981 when Dassault created the subsidiary Dassault Systèmes to develop and sell the software, under the management of its first CEO, Francis Bernard.

During the nineties CATIA was ported first in 1996 from one to four Unix operating systems, and was entirely rewritten for version 5 in 1998 to support Windows NT.

[9] In the years prior to 2000, this caused problems of incompatibility between versions that led to $6.1B in additional costs due to delays in production of the Airbus A380.