Some time ago, somebody asked who it was that said to whom that in
their opinion only X computers would ever be needed and no more need
be built.  I never saw any reasonably authoritative followups, but I
was away for most of May, and I think the item was posted before that.
So please excuse me if this is a duplicate, or not in the same group
as the original query.

Anyway, my source is an article by Lord Bowden (note for Americans:
"Lord" is a title, not a name).  He's now (or was recently) with the
University of Manchester, and was formerly a British cabinet minister
in their Dept. of Education and Science.  The article is called "The
Language of Computers", and can be found in American Scientist vol 58
(1970) pp 43-53, or in the anthology Mathematics: People, Problems,
Results, ed. by Douglas M. Campbell and John C. Higgins, pub. by
Wadsworth International (1984), vol 3 pp 2-14.

#  I joined Ferranti in 1950.  They had nearly finished building the
#  first digital computer ever to be made by a commercial firm in England
#  and they asked me to see if it would be possible to manufacture such
#  machines and sell them at a profit.  Our machine could do simple
#  arithmetic a thousand times as fast as a man with an adding machine,
#  but it was not at all obvious that anyone would be prepared to pay a
#  hundred thousand pounds or so for it.  It wasn't as reliable as we
#  could have liked it to be; it absorbed information slowly by reading
#  teleprinter ticker tape, and it could only print out its answers digit
#  by digit. ...

#  I must remind you that this was in the days before IBM.  I went to
#  see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential
#  analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very
#  specialized computers than anyone else.  He told me that, in his
#  opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country
#  could be done on the three digital computers which were then being
#  built -- one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester.
#  No one else, he said, would ever need machines of the own, or would
#  be able to afford to buy them.  He added that the machines were
#  exceedingly difficult to use, and could not be trusted to anyone who
#  was not a professional mathematician, and he advised Ferranti to get
#  out of the business and abandon the idea of selling any more of them.

#  It is amazing how completely wrong a great man can be. ... Hartree
#  used to tell this story against himself as long as he lived, but I
#  want to emphasize that in 1951 it was much harder to see into the
#  crystal ball than you might think.  Ferranti needed a new product, and
#  they were more hopeful than Professor Hartree ...

There's more good stuff in the article too.  Since Toronto is mentioned
I'll include one more quotation:

#  I believe that I was the first person who ever sold an electronic
#  digital computer on the commercial market.  It went to Toronto in 1951,
#  and the first job it tackled was to study the flow of the St. Lawrence
#  River thought the fragmented channels of the Thousand Islands.  These
#  calculations had to be done before the seaway could be built.  ... Our
#  machine did the work in three months.  The Canadians told us that the
#  machine had paid for itself several times over by doing this one
#  calculation so quickly.

Posted by Mark Brader, Toronto.