Edsger Dijkstra, from an an oral history interview with Philip Frana in 2001:
In many places, departments of computer science were founded before the shape of the intellectual discipline stood clearly out. … You also find it reflected in the names of scientific societies, such as the Association of Computing Machinery. … It’s the British Computer Society and it was the Dutch who had Het Nederlands Rekenmachine Genootschap; without knowing Dutch, you can hear the word “machine” in that name. And you got the departments of Computer Science, … rather than the department of computing science or the department of computation. Europe was later, it had coined the term Informatics, … Informatique. … Tony Hoare was a Professor of Computation. … At a given moment it — today the English prefer Information Technology, IT and Information Systems IS. I think the timing has forced the American departments to start too early. And they still suffer from it. Here, at UT, you can still observe it: it is the Department of Computer Sciences. … If you start to think about it, you can only laugh, but that time there were at least as many computer sciences as there were professors.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, OH 330. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 2 August 2001, Austin, Texas. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Pp. 23–24 of PDF.
[end]