With the passing of Michael Jackson, me and a few colleagues at work were reminiscing about the late 1980s, a time filled with Global Hypercolour t-shirts (which just showed you were sweaty), Swatch watches and the last funny Police Academy film (Police Academy 4). And we were trying to think about the first time we saw The Simpsons, which bought us onto Sky.

Looking back it doesn't seem like twenty years ago that Rupert Murdoch launched satellite television on the masses. Up until that point we were stuck with four channels and possibly a video recorder. US shows were restricted to Cheers, Dallas and Dynasty, with Friends, ER and The X-Files all a few years away.

The choices were simple: two BBC channels with Phillip Schofield in the Broom Cupboard, ITV with Bullseye and Highway or Channel 4 with erm... what that had on. The television landscape was a little bleak, to say the least.

However, on Sunday February 5th 1989, UK television saw a revolution in viewing habits with the launch of the Sky Television Network, a direct to home satellite service that came from the swanky-sounding Astra 1A satellite.

With much hype and coverage Sky launched, showing the viewing public that television should and could be a whole lot more. On reflection, the boast didn't really live up to the hype as the original line-up of Sky consisted of only four channels - Sky Channel, Sky News, Sky Movies and Eurosport.

Even though the success of Sky at the time was not as big as it could have been, with uptake initially being slow, the content that Sky showed really changed people's minds. Using mostly imported US shows, Sky 1 (which had been broadcast via cable television as far back as 1982!) became the flagship entertainment channel, boasting shows such as season four of Star Trek TNG, Moonlighting, Tales From The Crypt and WWE, as well as many shows produced by Fox (which Murdoch also owns, of course). And by 1990 there were around a million homes boasting satellite dishes on the side of their house and, for those of us without Sky, VHS copies of the above shows became currency for kids' popularity.

However, the biggest hit that Sky acquired was The Simpsons, a show that, at the time, was still in its infancy but proved to be a huge hit. The ‘Eat my shorts' mentality became the focal point of the show with Bart becoming the central focus of the posters, shoes, skateboards and merchandise that came along with the show, with ‘The Bartman' record even battling the aforementioned Michael Jackson in the charts.

Moving on a year, Sky became an even bigger entity as Sky TV merged with BSB - taking with it their ill-fated ‘Squariel' - to form British Sky Broadcasting. With this merger, Sky delivered more content and moved into the Pay for View market, showing boxing matches such as Mike Tyson Vs Frank Bruno. Wrestling also moved onto these new channels and left room for new shows to appear such as The X-Files, Deep Space 9, and a brief but funny show, The Strangerers.

With the uptake of Sky increasing year on year, the concept of satellite television has become commonplace and there are very few homes now without it. Even though it was seen as the end of television as we knew it at the time, and there were decries from certain newspapers and other broadcasters about the drop in quality, Sky has evolved into an integral part of our television viewing habits.

Innovative for the time and showing shows you could not see anywhere else, there was a time when Sky was the only way you could see Star Trek, Highlander or various other US-made shows. Now being able to watch whatever you want whenever is commonplace, but back in the early 1990s, this glimpse into the heady world of multi-channel television that Sky offered was as close as we could get to the awe-inspiring cable service that kids here in the UK so envied and desired that our American cousins took for granted.

Names like NBC, CBS and ABC were, at the time, things only seen in films, but Sky gave us a little of each and a taster into what it would be like to have so much choice and so many sci-fi and fantasy shows to choose from.

Whether you love or hate Sky, and whether you are an advocate of Murdoch or Newscorp, it doesn't really matter, as without them UK television would still be a sparse place with broadcasting still being controlled by the old-guard. And it was Sky who came in and shook British Broadcasting up, creating an environment that has provided us with channels dedicated to cartoons, action adventure shows and sci-fi programming.

Channels like, Anime, Bravo, and Sci-Fi (ok, maybe it's not all good) would not exist without Sky breaking the conformity, and we as the viewing public would not have the choice, good or bad, that we have today. We have a lot to thank Sky for as without them The Simpsons, and everything that has followed, might not have arrived on UK screens in anything like the same time scale. Ay, Caramba!