Coffee, Computers and the Internet: How They Have Changed Our Lives and the World

The Indian Coffee House

I started writing a story about my life long romance with coffee. Soon, computers came into it. It couldn’t be helped. So, this is a story about both. Take your pick. This story evolves as the worlds of coffee and computers have evolved over the past 50 plus years.

My romance with coffee began in 1967 when I was 14 years old. I lived in old Delhi, about a mile away from the Connaught Place in New Delhi. I lived on the periphery of these two cities which were like conjoined twins, but with very different personalities. There was a place called the Indian Coffee House in the very heart of Connaught Place. This is where this story begins.

For many years, I visited this Indian Coffee House almost every day and it literally shaped my life. I can say with absolute certainty that my life would not have been what it is if this coffee house did not exist. This place has a fascinating history. It was opened in 1955 and located in literally the very heart of New Delhi in Connaught Place, which itself is designed as a circle with an inner and an outer ring. It’s a wheel and spokes design with six roads emanating from its center, hexagonally, in both directions. At the very center is a park with a radial road around it. Indian Coffee House was situated at the inner edge of one spoke and right across from the park. The road to its right was Parliament Street, which led to the Parliament, about a mile away; and the road to its left was Janpath that housed many upscale shops and a cottage industries emporium selling arts and crafts artifacts from all Indian States. This road also led to the India Gate and Rajpath, leading to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace.

This coffee house was the fulcrum of Indian life. People from all walks walked through this place every day, some many times, in between their other activities. Some lingered there all day long from opening till close. Many luminaries including no less than nine prime ministers, union ministers, lesser politicians of all stripes, intellectuals, journalists, artists, students, foreign tourists from all over the world, and even the bus loads of hippies looking like Beatles came there in VW vans in late 60’s to early 70’s. The flower children, as they were called.

Some of them were adventurers, some were tourists, and some simply confused young people, weary of the draft and disenchanted with the ongoing Vietnam war. Many others were exploring spirituality, yoga, Hare Krishna, OSHO and movements of many other flavors in vogue at the time. Many were simply trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives, just as I was. Charles A. Reich explored this phenomenon in his 1979 book, The Greening of America. It attempts to explain the counterculture of the 1960s, their values, and why so many young people were doing what they were doing, including rock n roll, drugs, and fascination with the east, especially India.

As an impressionable young kid, I absorbed a variety of experiences from hanging out at this coffee house and meeting lots of people from all over with different perspectives – social, political, intellectual, cultural, and even global. This would make me the man that I will become in future. Needless to say, that I do not know of any other person from the community where I was born and where my home was who turned out to be like me. Home was a place where I went to sleep at night. I lived and grew up somewhere else, and my real life was shaping and happening there.

In 1971, I entered Hindu College. This happened after an interlude of three years in which I had to drop out of school due to a glitch in the system. One had to be 16 years of age to take the Higher Secondary, or pre-college exam. I was only 14 when I reached that point, so I could not take that exam. There were other factors as well that kept me out for another year. So, in a way, I attended Indian Coffee House for three years. As it turned out, I got some very valuable real-life education and experiences there.

Hindu College was and remains one of the best and most prestigious institutions in Delhi University. I loved my years there. I was on the debating teams. Several of my fellow students grew up to be future business and political leaders of India. Shashi Tharoor across the street was at St. Stephen’s College is one of them. He went on to become a diplomat at the UN, a Union Minister, and is now a Member of Parliament. Hardeep Puri from Hindu is a Union Minister now and several others gained prominent positions in industries, arts, and other areas. All of them frequented Indian Coffee House regularly.

Mumbai 1977 – 1982

In 1977, I left Delhi and moved to Bombay, now Mumbai. There I worked at Lintas, a premier advertising agency. It was a really fancy place and was a gateway to Bollywood for many. They started here as models for advertising commercials and many found a breakthrough into movies. Lintas had beautiful offices in Express Towers at Nariman Point. My own office had a window overlooking the rooftop swimming pool of the 5-star Oberoi Hotel and the Arabian Sea beyond. Those were the heady days. In the evenings, we went over to the Shamiana coffee shop at another iconic hotel at the Gateway of India, the Taj Mahal.

At Shamiana, they served a South Indian brew they called the South Indian Brahmin Coffee. I don’t know what it had got to do with Brahmins, but the taste was exquisite and still lingers in my mouth even 50 years later. I have been coming back to south India for many years now, but somehow not been able to find quite the same taste. Perhaps, it is just my nostalgia that won’t let go!

Coffee Dens of the World

My love of coffee has taken me to diverse coffee dens all over the world. I have been to coffee houses in Saudi Arabia, Cairo, Morocco, Istanbul, Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin. All of these places are steeped in culture, traditions, and history. The coffee preparation and consumption ways vary as well.

Coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia in the 15th century. From there, it was brought to Yemen a few decades later. To this day, Yemen Mokha (or Mocha), remains my favorite. But it is hard to find these days due to war and political turmoil in Yemen. Coffee was originally used by Muslim Sufis to help in concentration. So, it is said. It was served in villages and by Bedouins in deserts of Africa and Arabia as a welcome gesture and hospitality drink to the visitors. In early 80’s, I spent some time in the Middle East. I visited many Kehwah and Hookah shops in Saudi Arabia, Casablanca, and Istanbul. In each place coffee is brewed differently. People in African and Arabian villages still roast their beans in clay pots or aluminum pans over open wood fire or coals and hand grind it in stone mills. Then it is brewed in traditional vessels.

Coffee came to the Europe a century later than Arabia. It was brought to Hungary by Turks in 1526 when they invaded the country. From there, it quickly found its way to Vienna, then to Paris and other parts of Europe. Many iconic cafes emerged in major European cities, especially Paris and Vienna.

Cafe de Flore still remains the most well-known cafes in the world. It has had an outsized influence on many social institutions and culture. It is said that French Revolution may not have happened if there were no Cafes in Paris. True or not, it highlights their importance in history.

Cafes were breeding grounds and workshops of thinkers, philosophers, writers, artists, politicians, radicals, and even revolutionaries. Cafe de Flore, and its adjacent Les Deux Magots in Paris were in a class of their own. Many historical figures of the time including Hemingway, James Joyce, Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Picasso, and many more were regulars and found a home and community there. It was also a hub of expatriate writers and artists from all over the world. Many a literary career began there. A popular coffee brewing method, the French Press was also invented in Paris in 1852 by Jacques-Victor Delforge.

Coffee is now prepared and consumed in many different ways in different parts of the world. Methods range from simple drip to French Press, AeroPress, Chemex, Pour Over (my favorite), Siphon. Pods, Capsules and others.

At the extreme end, there are sophisticated machines that can precisely control every aspect of coffee making including coffee grounds measured in microns, moisture, calcium content of water, precise temperature, relative humidity and even compensate for the air breeze flowing around the coffee machine, and produce the ultimate cup. These machines cost thousands of dollars.

Coffee Comes to America

This brings me to the most significant coffee revolution in its history and modern times. The seeds of this revolution were planted in 1966. Alfred Peet came to the United States from the Netherlands in 1955. He was 35 years old. He loved his coffee, but couldn’t find it here. Coffee in America was really bad back then. America did not have a coffee culture, whereas Europe had it there for more than a hundred years. Peet missed it. Badly!

So, Peet decided to introduce ‘real’ coffee to America. He opened Peet’s Coffee store on April 1, 1966 at 2124 Vine Street, Berkeley, California. He only sold high quality coffee and beans. The venture was an immediate success. There was a ready and eagerly awaiting clientele for something like this. The famous University of California – Berkeley was literally next door, a few blocks away, with thousands of students and an upscale sophisticated community. Peet could have easily expanded, but he was not interested. He was more passionate about coffee than coffee business. The store still exists and is a famous landmark. I spent 20 years in California Bay Area and used to visit this place often.

Around the same time in 1969 or so, three students from the nearby University of San Francisco started coming around to Peet’s Coffee. They were originally from Seattle and saw a potential of starting a similar high quality coffee beans store there. They discussed the idea with Peet and he agreed to help them. Peet taught them all about coffee.

Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker, the three students, went back to Seattle, Washington, and opened their first coffee store at 2000 Western Avenue, on March 30, 1971. They named it Starbucks.

Five years later, in 1976, they moved the store to its now famous location at 1912 Pike Place, Seattle. For the first few years, they bought their green beans from Peet, but in 1973, Peet stopped selling them beans and trained their own roastmaster Jim Reynolds instead. Now, the three musketeers were truly on their own.

A few more years went by. In early 1980’s Peet indicated that he wanted to retire. In 1984, Starbucks purchased Peet’s Coffee business altogether. It took them some time to absorb it and open a few more stores. By 1986, there were six coffee stores operating under Starbucks name. All in Seattle. They had also started selling espresso by then. All stores were doing very well. The three former college students had come a long way and were very happy.

Howard Schultz Dreams Big

In 1982, Starbucks had hired Howard Schultz as Marketing Director. He visited Italy for the first time in 1983 on a buying trip. He was fascinated by the coffee culture there. He imagined huge opportunities to do the same in USA. When he came back from the Italy trip, he prepared a big presentation to Starbucks owners about huge growth opportunities. But the owners were not interested. They were happy with what they had. They did not want to expand. Howard was very frustrated. Every day that went by was a risk of losing to someone else. So, after a while, Schultz parted ways and went out on his own. He started another cafe nearby in 1985. He called it Il Giornale. It was successful, but Howard had big ideas. Really BIG!

Starbucks Revolution – That Almost Didn’t Happen

The opportunity came in 1986. It began with a sputter, and how it finally happened is fascinating. Starbucks probably would not be what it is today if William H. Gates Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates did not help Howard Schultz to acquire it.

In 1987, the founder of Starbucks, Jerry Baldwin, was looking to sell the six stores company for $3.8 million. They offered an exclusive deal to Schultz and gave him 90 days to raise the money. Schultz was obviously ecstatic. But in the next two months he had been able to raise only half the money.

In the meanwhile, some other forces were working in the background against him. One of the investors from his current venture from Il Giornale had reached out to Jerry Baldwin and made a counter offer of $4 million cash. Schultz was shocked and panicked. He knew who had made the offer. It was one of the three big business titans in Seattle at the time, one of whom had invested in Il Giornale, and tasted the potential.

At that time, one of Schultz friends and attorney Scott Greenberg mentioned that he might be able to help. Greenberg knew Bill Gates Sr., who was a towering figure in Seattle, both in person and stature. He was six-foot-seven and a force to be reckoned with. He listened to the entire story and told Schultz, “We are going to take a walk.” Schultz heart was racing. He said, “Where?” He said, ‘We are going to see the man’. They went to see the competitive buyer, the titan. Bill Gates Sr walked into this person’s office and said to him: ‘you should be ashamed of yourself that you’re going to steal this kid’s dream. It is not going to happen. You and I both know this is not going to happen.’ “With in 10 minutes, he told him to stand down, we’re walking out of this office and this kid’s buying this company,” That’s just what happened. In August 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks for $3.8 million. End of story. Or, is it? Turned out, it was just the beginning.

On October 19, 1987, the first Starbucks outside of Seattle opened in Chicago. At that time, I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, about 100 miles from the Chicago Starbucks. A few weeks later, I, along with a group of my friends, went to see this Starbucks. I still remember my first foamy coffee there, called Cafe Latte.

Starbucks Grows Big

The rest is history, as they say. Chicago still holds the distinction of having the largest, four stories high, Starbucks in the world. It is located on Michigan Avenue, also referred to as The Magnificent Mile. The store is operated under their exclusive line called – Starbucks Reserve Roastery. The centerpiece of this store is a 56-foot steel cask, the company’s tallest, where coffee beans go to rest and de-gas after being roasted. It is a beautiful sculptural blend of form and function.

As of March 2023, Starbucks was operating over 38,000 stores and serving over 10 million customers a day in 84 countries. It had an annual revenue of over $32 Billion, as of 2023. Starbucks has announced that it plans to double this number worldwide, enter new countries, and further expand product lines.

The Third Wave

The Starbucks success spawned many other coffee brands and chains all over the world. In the United States, other brands that took off include Gloria Jeans, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Lavazza, Blue Bottle, Philz, Allegro, Collectivo, Slumptown, Counter Culture, Third Wave, and others. They serve many more millions of customers every day, everywhere.

This revolution is continuing. The next level of coffee shops, beyond Starbucks and Costa Cafes layer, are beginning to emerge. They are like the micro-breweries of the beer industry. They are also referred to as The Third Wave. These artisan shops are taking coffee passions to a new level, from obscure specialty farms beans to precise roasting, brewing, and the ultimate cup.

There is another important element to note here. It is somewhat sad as well. In spite of enormous success of Starbucks and other chains, the people who make it all possible, the coffee growers all over the world, have not benefited in equal measure, or anywhere close to it. Starbucks buys about 800 million pounds (360 million kilograms) of coffee from farmers all over the world. It spends about $960 million on buying green beans, and pays about $1.2 per pound, ($2.65 per kilogram), or just about 3% of total revenue. One would hope that coffee growers would do better.

As of 2023, there were approximately 25 million families involved in coffee growing and production all over the world, producing roughly 10.4 million tons (10,400 kilograms tons) of coffee per year.

The Dawn of a New Age: Computers, Internet, and Web

As enormously successful Starbucks and coffee story is as a business, however, there is another subtle fact that is often overlooked that made the coffee revolution possible and so pervasive in our lives. It was the convergence of several forces that were changing and homogenizing the lifestyle of an entire new generation all over the world. These were computers, internet, web, social media, online shopping, offshore sourcing, foreign workers insourcing, and globalization of an entire new generation worldwide. This generation was living and working the same way everywhere, and coffee shops became a big part of their lives.

The new way was replacing the old institutions. United States is a perfect example. There, the shopping malls, once the hub of life, and downtowns are dying or decaying, whereas online institutions are thriving.  In 2023, many stores closed doors on Market Street in San Francisco due to lack of business and vandalism.  San Francisco Center, an upscale multistory shopping mall shut down as well.  The area now looks like a ghost town and is saddled with homeless people in makeshift tents.  This would have been unthinkable a few years ago.  The reasons for this are many and complex.  But a key aspect is changing lifestyle of the new generation and their purchasing habits.

Microsoft and Apple were founded around the same time in 1975 and 1976. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both working on moving beyond Atari 800 and Commodore 64, the two 8-bit home computers at the time, introduced at the 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show.  But two companies had different focus.  Microsoft was working on developing computer operating systems that will be licensed to computer manufacturers and software applications like word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database management.  Apple had a different approach. Jobs wanted to control the entire range of their products from end to end including computers, operating system, and software applications.  They did not want to license their technology to others.  These different approaches will have significant impact on the company’s future. 

In 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, due to disagreement with its CEO at the time John Scully.  Both wanted to take company in different directions.  Jobs left and founded NeXT Inc. The name NeXT probably had dual connotations. It was next generation of computers and/or a next gig for Steve Jobs, after Apple Computers. NeXT was designed as a diskless computer.  Jobs vision was that in future all computing will be networked. No one else saw this happening and its huge potential that will permeate every aspect of human life on the planet. Internet had not yet emerged. How correct he was!  It is happening now and we call it cloud computing.

In 2007, when he was once again at the helm at Apple, Jobs changed the company name from Apple Computers to just Apple Inc.  It was a strategic move and emphasized that Apple was a consumer electronics company and not just a computer company.  We all know the results.  The company was reborn and has become world’s most valuable company by selling iPhones, iPads, Watches and other devices.

In 1981, IBM released its first personal computer called IBM PC (model 5150) on August 12, 1981. This became the de facto PC standard, produced later by many companies. They are still called PC, decades later.

Apple 1 was first released on April 1, 1976. However, the first Macintosh with a built-screen, GUI interface, and mouse for navigation did not arrive until 1984. These two inventions – GUI, and mouse – probably had the biggest impact on computers industry, until the arrival of the internet a few years later.

Internet is Born

The internet was started in the 1960’s as a government research project in the United States.  In the beginning, computers were large clunky machines, and there was no standard way for them to share information and talk with each other.   This was a huge limitation and led to the formation of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). This will later evolve in to what is now called internet, and the development of a standard protocol for all diverse computers to be able to connect and work with each other.  This protocol was called TCP/IP. TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. It was on January 1, 1983 and this date is considered the official birthday of the internet.

Internet dawned slowly in the world around 1990. But it grew fast. Really fast! In the beginning, there was no easy way to access the internet. People had no idea what to do with it beyond the academics who exchanged research papers and collaborated with each other. Even that was very tedious. There was no bandwidth. The modems were crawling slow with the original ones with a speed of just 64 kbps. When 256 kbps modems came around, they were marketed as blazing fast!

Even computers were very slow. They didn’t even have a hard disk! Data was stored on flexible floppy disks that had to be inserted in one or two available slots on the computers. The largest disks could hold a maximum of 1.2 megabyte of data. The maximum installed RAM was one megabyte for a long time.

There was no GUI interface. One still had to type commands on dot prompts to do anything. Then lines scrolled down painfully slowly. Sometimes, everything on screen suddenly disappeared!  It was called, “Blue Screen of Death”.

It was still magical though. No one had seen anything better yet beyond the typewriters. The first computer applications to emerge were word processors, followed by spreadsheets and database applications. In early 90’s, if one knew how to use Lotus 123, a spreadsheet software, and dBase lll, a database application, one could write their own ticket in corporate America.

By mid 90’s, computers had penetrated the corporate world completely. All Fortune 500 companies had internet presence. Things were moving very fast. Search engines started popping up. Yahoo was the first one, way before Google. Online America, a categorized information search application came next. There were message boards. Email came around. First email service that people could sign up for was Hotmail, launched by Sabeer Bhatia, an Indian entrepreneur, in 1996.

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, social media, and e-commerce had not arrived yet. But it won’t be long. Seems like all these apps were waiting for one door to open. An easy-to-use web browser with visual interface, a mouse, and network bandwidth. All of that happened within months to a couple of years.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web system, later simply called just Web, was invented at CERN in Switzerland by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. But hardly anyone knew about it beyond the academics.

In 1993, a student named Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne created a user-friendly web browser called Mosaic. This was the true beginning of the internet revolution. Soon enough, Mosaic became Netscape, then Mozilla Firefox. Both Microsoft and Apple released their own browsers. Then internet just seemed to explode overnight. The invention of the web browser made it possible for the world to access the world wide web with ease, and everything else that came after it. This literally was the door that opened the Web to the World.

There was another phenomenon emerging to coincide with the two – A New Generation. Literally. These 20 somethings were ready to change the world. Some of these 20 somethings had already started it and more will come.

Internet vs Web

People often do not make a distinction between the internet and the web and think they are the same thing. In reality they are two completely different things. Internet is just a network of computers, millions and billions of them, connected to each other.  Whereas, web is the actual content that we see on the screens, or web pages.  Another way of describing this distinction is to think of internet as a network of roads, without any vehicles on it. The vehicles travel on the network of roads and get from one place to another.  Similarly, information travels on interconnected network of computers and from computer to computer.

All the information on the internet is collected in distinct pages.  Each of these pages have a unique identification address. It is called URL. These unique URLs hyperlinked and connected with each other create distinct websites and their content. And all of these pieces of information residing on the internet are collectively called the web or World Wide Web of information as it was originally called.

Internet Pioneers

These names include: Tim Berners-Lee (WEB), Marc Andreesen (Web Browser Mosaic), Jerry Yang (Yahoo Search Engine], Larry Page, Sergey Brin (Google Search Engine), Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail), Peter Thiel (PayPal), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (facebook).