Intel has released a press release today announcing that, according to Gartner Dataquest, the PC industry has shipped its 1 billionth PC today.

Just 25 years after the first commercially available PC (the Altair) was introduced, which had state-of-the-art 2Mhz Intel 8080 CPU and when fully loaded 64Kb of RAM.

Although it took 25 years for the 1 billionth PC to be shipped, Gartner expect the next milestone, of 2 billion to be reached within the next 6 years!

Well, the last fact won't be that suprising - Gartner estiamtes that 60% of U.S. households, 50% in Western Europe, and 40% in Asia Pacific have PC's - and I guess they expect the rest to cacth up pretty quickly. But then again, more and more households have more than one PC, for example at the moment i'm writing this sitting with 6 pc's around me (only 3 are "modern" i.e post-Pentium III)