In an interesting statistic that definitely shows the growth of personal computer use over the years, it is estimated that now, after 27 years of market life, PCs have reached one billion users. So, worldwide that means that an average of 1 in 6 people owns a computer. That number is expected to double in only 8 years, marking a significant exponential growth in PC adoption. A lot of that growth is attributed to emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China whom are expected to acquire 75% of those 1 billion.
A more interesting statistic will be how many of those one billion have readily-available Internet access. However, this sort of news is encouarging. Perhaps within the next few decades we will see near-global coverage of PC and Internet access.