Not many people know this but the computer industry has its roots firmly embedded in the African continent and as far back as the 15th Century. It is true, trust me......

You see, I base this on the fact, heavily researched in my thirty years in the IT industry, that the lifeblood the drives all the hardworking, industrious I.T. professionals is, in fact, coffee.

Without coffee Babbage would not have been able to design his differential engine, without coffee Tommy Flowers would never have had the clarity of thought to build Collosus at Bletchley Park. Bill Gates, sans coffee, would have remained in college and Microsoft would have died aborning.  Steve Jobs would have only aspired to the iNothing and Apple would have remained a fruit.

In reality, the founder of the modern I.T. industry was the mufti of Aden called Jama-al-Din al-Dhabhani who first adopted the use of coffee back in 1454 and, indirectly, started the coffee trade from Ethiopia.

Coffee has well-known invigorating properties, as one 17th Century drinker described,

'Tis extolled for drying up the Crudities of the Stomack, and for expelling Fumes out of the Head. Excellent Berry! which can cleanse the English-man's Stomak of Flegm, and expel Giddinesse out of his Head".

With all these medicinal properties is it any wonder that modern life has been transformed by all the coffee-fuelled computer engineers who consistently rise to the new challenges and ideas in one protracted caffeine rush of energy and drive even if it doesn't do much for ones spelling.

So it is appropriate that Google's new software architecture that will underpin its distributed software environments in the future is called "Caffeine". I wish I could extol the virtues of Google's "Caffeine" but, to be honest, we will never really see it as it is an architecture that will enable Google to better utilise their extensive data centres throughout the world rather than the next Google Earth so, instead, I will get another cup of coffee!