Espresso requires fairly elaborate machinery, so is most suitable for commercial operations serving lots of customers. For most of American (and European) history, coffee was made by some simple form of decoction: boiling water with ground coffee in it. The trick is to both cycle the water through the grounds a couple of times to extract the most flavor for the money, and then to filter out all the grounds.

There were various techniques and vessels used for this, from "cowboy coffee" with little or no filtration—just settlement—to large urns used in restaurants and cafeterias that had particular recipes about pouring the strained coffee back through the grounds once and only once. Such instructions, used by the Fred Harvey eating-houses that were found all along the Santa Fe Railroad, can be found in Stephen Fried's book about the chain, Appetite for America.

The coffee percolator was invented around 1889, and soon became the favored way that most American households brewed coffee. In a percolator, the liquid is recycled through the grounds several times, efficiently extracting flavor, but the grounds remain in a perforated basket that's easy to manufacture and also easy to clean for reuse. A glass top usually allows the maker to monitor the color of the brew to avoid overextraction and bitterness. Stovetop percolators were supplanted by electric percolators, but this remained the primary home coffeemaking appliance for Americans in the mid-20th century.

Different parts of Europe came to favor different methods for brewing coffee: pour-over methods in Scandinavia and Germany; the French press in, um, France; and the chunky cast-aluminum Moka Express—a sort of stovetop combination of a percolator and an espresso machine—in Italy.

By the 1960s, many restaurants were using specialized basket-brew coffeemakers such as the Bunn, developed in 1957. These eliminated the danger of overextraction but required a finer-ground coffee since water only went past once. In the early 1970s, a startup called North American Systems brought this technology to the home countertop, introducing the Mr. Coffee automated drip coffeemaker in 1972. The technology quickly gained acceptance in home and workplaces, since it eliminated the bitterness of overbrewed coffee, and manufacturers rushed to distribute the finer-ground coffee the new machines needed. Quite a few variations made their way to American and European markets, with many European machines adopting the conical filters while Americans tended to use basket filters.

It's important to keep in mind that by the early 1980s, coffee was seen as an "old person's drink," so much so that the National Coffee Association in 1984 produced TV commercials urging Baby Boomers to “Join the Coffee Achievers.” The ads didn't seem to do the trick, but Starbucks began rolling east with Grunge Rock and other things Seattletastic, and other bespoke coffee shops began to open in hip neighborhoods; the idea went mainstream when "Friends" in 1994 popularized the idea of coffee shops as a place to hang out with buddies.

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Edited to add: Bing found it!

Pretty much this exact question—and my response—were both posted here a couple of years ago. I couldn't seem to find it with any sort of Google or Reddit search.