Column: US army and Brit comedy, thank you

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: It was 1969, the year Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Max Yasgur’s farm, the year the Beatles broke up, the year man landed on the freakin’ moon. It was the year Honduras and El Salvador went to war over a football game, the year the Boeing 747 first took to the skies, the year Led Zeppelin burst onto the scene and changed Rock n Roll forever.

In the midst of all this excitement, John Cleese thought it would be a good idea to invite Michael Palin to join Graham Chapman and himself to create a brand new television series for the BBC. Across the pond, US defence scientists used a cool new technology called ‘packet-switching’ to establish a network connection (They called it ARPANET. Scientists. You’d think they’d have come up with something cooler) between computers located at the UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

As a result of these two seemingly unrelated events, today we watch episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on YouTube, excitedly send the link to our friends over e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, and waste the rest of our working day LOLing at the antics of the greatest comedy team in history. It’s a complete #WIN.

Today, forty years later, it’s almost impossible to wrap our minds around the impact that the Internet has had on our lives. It’s like trying to describe how our lives have been affected by the invention of the wheel, or language, or processed food. Today, most of us live in a dizzying swirl of instant, always-on connections that criss-cross so many aspects of our daily lives, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before the Internet.

One way to try and define the impact of the Internet is to look at the situations that it has made extinct. When was the last time you spent days trying to remember the lyrics to a song on the tip of your tongue, or the author of a book, or the winner of a sporting event? When was the last time you pored over old newspapers to find the advertisement you suddenly want to respond to? When was the last time that getting information from a college meant writing a letter to them and hoping for the best?