“I don’t need 1 Gbps while strolling down Newbury Street in Boston.”
Be careful, Glenn. 
This kind of declamation can all too readily become Bill Gates’s infamous manifesto on why anyone would ever need more than 640K RAM.
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I literally LOLd! Thank you for the laugh. I am sure if bandwidth is available, someone will figure out a way to fill it. But it’s a bit like phones. The only better feature I want in a phone now is a camera. I want a mirrorless camera that’s an iPhone. I don’t need a faster iPhone.
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Or Ken Olsen of DEC saying 100 mhz was the fastest any workstation would need. Apple once releases a patch for IIFX that slowed down scroll bars because a system update ( i forget which one) made them scroll too fast. That was in the days of soldered lithium batteries. > end old guy reminiscence <
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Or Thomas Watson saying that the world had a need for maybe five computers.
And five thousand copying machines, of course.
Jeremy
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And Kodak saying mobile phones won’t significantly affect stand alone camera or film sales.
This is hilarious. One hour ago, I told that exact story about super-fast IIfx scrolling on the phone to someone. I hadn’t thought about it in years. What are the odds!
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I worked as a contractor for Kodak in the early 1990s, and they had the world’s first production digital camera (my teaching facility had the serial #000001 model), and a huge array of advanced photographic, scanning, and production tools, as well as DTP software for Mac they had purchased from Atex. They were ten years ahead. Then, somehow, a few years later they were 10 years behind.
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Right, because they wanted to make bigger and bigger computers until they filled entire cities!
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I love this thread, especially reading about the IIfx, with the “fx” meaning “fast(er) extended”.
Do you realize a IIfx system cost 10K at the time? Clearly the Mac Pro of its day … at a titanic 30 Hz!
We had one hundred Mac IIfx models at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging. I ran the technical side of things and also developed courses there from around September 1991 to I think late 1992. At some point, I’m forgetting what month, I left the Center and went to work for an imaging service that was renting a building from the Center and teaching some classes there, too. I handled color separation, typesetting, and other services for the couple who owned it. Left Maine in May 1993!
I’m pretty sure we paid about $6,000 for each Mac IIfx in 1991 (before I arrived). Apparently that was part of a whole situation I wasn’t involved in. Kodak didn’t even get a bulk discount, but basically paid retail. I met John Sculley as a result of that experience, as well as a great variety of artists, photographers, and designers, like Paul Davis, Greg Heisler and Lance Hidy.
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I assume you meant to write 30 MHz 
I recall the first thing I did with a IIfx was to run the app Speedometer,* a benchmarking utility that read out with a skeuomorphic display of an analog meter style that spun the measurement while the needle was fixed in place.
Obviously the author was a bit of a realistic visionary: On the IIfx, upon clicking the “Go!” button, the meter spun wildly and crashed into it’s high-side “limit”, cracking the meter glass and making the appropriate cracking sound as well.
I was bummed. I wonder if anything faster has come out since?
*I think that was the name, but there have been so many things called that, it’s hard to remember. Maybe some of you geezers can recall this…
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No, you’re right. It was called Speedometer.
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