Answer: (ii) Inability to manage complex software projects effectively

The Software Crisis (late 1960s onwards) refers to the widespread project failures — late deliveries, blown budgets, buggy software, and projects abandoned altogether — caused primarily by the growing complexity of software and the industry's inability to manage large, complex software projects using ad-hoc, unstructured methods.

Why the others are wrong:

• (i) Lack of programming languages — by the 1960s many languages (FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL) existed; the problem was not language availability.
• (iii) Insufficient hardware resources — hardware was advancing rapidly; the bottleneck was software management, not machine resources.
• (iv) Overuse of automation — automation was minimal; this was never the crisis trigger.

The crisis motivated the birth of software engineering as a discipline (application of engineering principles to software development), introducing structured processes, requirements analysis, design, testing, and project management.