History of SoHaR Incorporated

SoHaR was founded at the beginning of 1978 to fill the need for reliability services for computer based systems, including hardware and software. The company name is a contraction of Software and Hardware Reliability. At that time the reliability engineering discipline was focused on prevention of hardware failures and software developers, while motivated to deliver a reliable product, lacked the metrics for quantifying the progress toward that goal.

The need for an integrated approach to hardware and software reliability was keenly felt in the spacecraft and missile fields where there had been some spectacular and very costly failures due to lack of combined hardware and software reviews and testing. Early SoHaR customers were the USAF Space and Missile Systems Division (SAMSO) and NASA organizations concerned with long duration space missions. They were soon joined by prime contractors in the space and missile field. Another noteworthy customer was the Disney organization for review of the computer controls of their gravity (roller coaster) rides and automatic train controls.

By the mid-1980's the company's expertise led to long term associations with the FAA (primarily for air traffic control) and the USAF Systems Division (primarily for aircraft flight controls). Later in that decade SoHaR published two reports that became instant bestsellers: "Computer Resources Handbook for Flight Critical Systems" (notable for its emphasis on fault tolerance provisions) and "Reliability Prediction for Spacecraft" (which showed decreasing failure rate with time on orbit).

The decade of the 90's showed increased activity in the production and marketing of software programs for reliability improvement, particularly MEADEP and SCAT. More recently these have been joined by MOVAT, RAM Commander and FAVOWEB.