The past is the future

After three decades of the IEEE Reliability Society it is useful to reflect on the early days of our formal reliability discipline and ponder the future. The early literature was prepared largely by design engineers and university teachers, not so much by quality control engineers. The result of that twist of fate was the typical saying that the reliability of a product reached a peak just when the design documentation was released by the design engineers, and thus the reliability could only be degraded by those who tried to make the product. That most abominable phrase, inherent reliability, was invented and is still with us today, unfortunately. Inherent reliability really is the reliability number obtained by charging to it only those failures that an able, agressive, intelligent, and imaginative designer can´t blame on someone else. It took a decade or two to acknowledge that reliability needed to grow, both during and after the design.