I always remember reading statistics about how many televisions the average North American had in their home, and wondered how often those numbers were skewed by those families who had televisions in every room of their house. Obviously there were some households that were screwing up those statistics. And then years later they started quoting statistics about computers, saying "there's 1 computer for every x households".

I'm pretty sure I'm not your average computer user, but neither am I an Ubergeek. I have seven computers in my house, and there's only me and my wife that are computer literate. This does not take into consideration the two PDA's or my smartphone. But seriously, when I consider that each computer has one or more purposes, including a gaming machine, and two PVRs, and one storage server, it's not that unreasonable to justify this many machines.

Now I used to live with a prominent gamer who worked for id Software, and did work on games like Quake 2 and Quake 3 (Capture The Flag anyone?), and he had nine machines in a row. Now forgiving the fact that it was necessary for him to be able to test games on different platforms, it was more of a workplace setup, and not an average household.

When you add up all of the game systems, portable gaming devices, music players, and other storage and media devices, my household is cornucopia of digital delight. And again, I think I'm pretty ordinary. If I didn't give away a computer to my in-laws, and another to a friend, my home would be networked like a suburban Internet cafe. I think I've come a long way from the late 1970's, when our family had a TRS-80 and a Magnavox Odyssey system (for Pong).

So in this new millennium, just how many computers in a single home is considered average? I hope I'm not throwing the numbers off too much.