Seems like there was a time when "machine" was the term grant committees wanted to hear, they were perhaps fed up with the theory and wanted more tangible stuff

Seems like there was a time when "machine" was the term grant committees wanted to hear, they were perhaps fed up with the theory and wanted more tangible stuff. So the theorists branded their stuff as machines. See support vector machine, kernel machines... Similar to how "dynamic programming" was coined to please funding agencies.