  Software Reliability has just passed the 50-year milestone as a technical
discipline along with Software Engineering. This paper traces the roots of
Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) from its pre-software history to the
beginnings of the field with the first software reliability model in 1967
through its maturation in the 1980s to the current challenges in proving
application reliability on smartphones and in other areas. This history began
as a thesis proposal for a History of Science research program and includes
multiple previously unpublished interviews with founders of the field. The
project evolved to also provide a survey of the development of SRE from notable
prior histories and from citations of new work in the field including
reliability applications to Agile Methods. This history concludes at the
modern-day providing bookends in the theory, models, literature, and practice
of Software Reliability Engineering from 1968 to 2018 and pointing towards new
opportunities to deepen and broaden the field.
