Computer programming in the 1950s to 1960s was not recognized as an academic discipline and unlike mature sciences there were no theoretical concepts or coding systems. Programming as a professional activity was poorly understood in those years. In the late 1960s computer programming was in state of crisis. Software crisis is a term used in the early days of computing science for the difficulty of writing useful and efficient computer programs in the required time. The software crisis was due to the rapid increases in computer power and the complexity of the problems that could be tackled. With the increase in the complexity of the software, many software problems arose because existing methods were insufficient. The term "software crisis" was coined by some attendees at the first of the NATO Software Engineering Conferences in 1968 at Garmisch, Germany. His 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture makes reference to this same problem: "The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem."