> As a result, primarily in the U.S., the topic became prematurely known as "computer science"---which actually is like referring to surgery as "knife science"---and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment.
In the SICP lectures, they explain why names like 'Computer Science' come into being.
They explain it by explaining the origins of the word 'Geometry', which translates to 'Earth Measurement'. What they deduce is when a field is young, its hard to make a distinction between the science behind the field and instruments/tools you spend time with to make the science happen. That is because you spend so much time with the tools that the big part of the work is tool expertise itself.
Until we arrive at the perfect computers and perfect languages, we are going to be stuck with this sort of a phenomenon for a very long time.
Edsger W Dijkstra. Mathematicians and computing scientists: The cultural gap. Abacus, 4(4): 26–31, June 1987. ISSN 0724-6722. URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=25596.25598.
Which is similar in spirit to the contested quote, and predates by a few years any of the references on Wikiquote.