Happy Birthday World Wide Web- congratulations to the Internet.

Happy Birthday World Wide Web- congratulations to the Internet.

Happy 30th birthday to the World Wide Web. It hardly seems like yesterday since you were a mere child when most of us were convinced that the Internet was Milan's new centre forward and the World Wide Web was a homage to all ducks throughout the world. This is one momentous day and maybe the world will never know what it was like before our method of communication became so much easier than we'd ever thought possible.

In 1989 a British visionary by the name of Tim Berners Lee discovered one of the most revolutionary inventions of modern times. At first they scoffed most disrespectfully, poured scorn on something they believed quite confidently would never work, sniffed sceptically at a a burgeoning technology that would either blow up in our faces, fail to catch on with the public and never become the massively popular and cultural phenomena that it quite clearly is now.

In fact it's hard to imagine a world without e-mails, software, Microsoft XL, downloads, uploads, millions of wildly diverse websites, Google, Yahoo and a whole cyberspace of cryptic messages and, above all, Facebook followed in more recent years by Twitter. The world is now talking to each other through the medium of online chatting, exchanging likes and approval, forever remarking and criticising, judging, becoming outrageously opinionated, forthright, hot under the collar and then getting all upset for quite a while. But we would never have it any other way because that's today's fashion statement.

Before the arrival of the Internet we behaved in a way that seemed perfectly proper and normal at the time. We would make lengthy phone calls in the office, send neatly typed letters to each other in the office, send faxes by the thousand and then jump into the local red phone box because mobile phones had yet to become commercially marketable.

Then, if we didn't know anything, something or somebody we would leaf through heavy telephone directories, flicking endlessly through weighty reference books, giant encyclopaedias, travel brochures and bulky folders groaning with data on everything from names, addresses, people and places. It all seems a long time ago and none of us could possibly have dreamt that one day our lives would become so much simpler and less wearisome.

Now at the flick of a switch on your PC, a quick adjustment of your mouse and then a click of that mouse everything, everybody and anything has now become ingeniously accessible. There is a wondrous immediacy about the Internet that would have seemed unthinkable 40 or 50 years ago. Then we had pens and pencils, rulers and exercise books. We had rubbers and set squares, long hand writing defaced by words and sentences that would become farcically unreadable, smudged and smeared horribly or crossed out. But then it was all very acceptable because nobody had told us then that four decades forward we would never have to worry about all of those problematic chores in our working life and back at home. Because the Internet was here.

So it was that in 1989 our sources of information and the way in which we collated them and made sense of them seemed impossibly complicated. Why bother to go to all that trouble in looking up a company's essential details when the simple act of typing that company's name into an Internet search engine was no more than a click away on a computer? Why do we trawl through acres of print on the written page for celebrities life stories when we had at our disposal Wikipaedia? Then, in a blink of the eyelid, we cut  out all of that unnecessary fact checking in chunky books the size of a town or city.

Soon, we would have those wondrous e-mails. In the old days we would, quite amusingly, hunt out sheafs of A4 paper just because we wanted write a letter to an old friend, member of the family or just someone who would appreciate the natural  beauty of a carefully addressed, neatly written letter. The address would naturally gravitate to a specific corner of the said letter and then we would do our utmost to make the letter completely legible. The date would be placed strategically in the other corner of the piece of paper and then we would refer to them as Dear Sir or Miss or Mrs if you were applying for a job .

If on the other hand you were writing to friends or family you would be infinitely less formal because you knew they wouldn't mind. The memory takes me to the 1970s again. There was a trend back then for establishing friendships with people we knew but who may have lived on the other side of the world. Pen friends may have been passing ships in the night but some of us can still remember cramming a thousand words into one sheet of paper and then squeezing the last couple of words into a messy, incoherent scribble.

How though we must have longed for  any kind of device that would just eliminate all of these hieroglyphics and incomprehensible crossings out. So it was that computers and word processors came to our rescue and no longer would we have to sweat anxiously in case our application forms had been incorrectly written. The Internet had wiped out the boring and laborious, replacing it instantly with an e-mail platform which would immediately remove complexity with a straightforward tapping on a computer keyboard. The whole process would take up no time at all.

In retrospect the birth of social media websites was inevitable, a logical progression in a world that had now become increasingly more sociable and gregarious. Facebook and Twitter, for a vast majority of us, is quite definitely the best thing that ever happened to the Internet. It's released what had perhaps been the quiet voice inside our heads into a living, breathing organism.

 We now express our innermost feelings with unashamed eloquence. We can offload our guilt, our pride, our joys and triumphs, knowing for certain that somewhere on this great big planet of ours somebody will be reading and watching intently in case it may be too controversial for words. At times the Internet has been both dreadfully abused and exploited for dark and nefarious acts, a notice board for evil propaganda and shocking, libellous stories. We now live in a world of factually inaccurate remarks designed quite obviously to hurt and humiliate.

So it is that the World Wide Web blows out the candles on its 30th birthday, still thriving but wary of intruders and nasty impostors who would wish to destroy it. The hackers are on the warpath, the spoilers and the interfering busybodies are out to get the Internet and nothing seems to be stopping them. The scam artists are hovering from above like bats in the belfry, threatening and sneering, promising to disrupt and cause maximum inconvenience.

The Internet will though undoubtedly stand tall and stand its ground, ploughing gallantly through the heavy seas of good times and difficult times. We now have in our possession mobile phones by the thousand, Tablets in every conceivable corner of our homes, I-Pads scattered joyously around living rooms and kitchens before being plugged up to be re-charged on our coffee tables.

It doesn't seem that 30 years have passed since the beginning of a life changing event that would change our lives irrevocably. So put those pens and pencils down for ever more because Alexa is about to tell you that tomorrow in Bulgaria  it will rain for approximately 25 minutes at 4.30 in the afternoon. How clever is that? It will also play your favourite trad jazz, funk or heavy metal music in a matter of seconds. Then your Amazon echo will perform a similar function by answering all of your questions pronto. Happy Birthday Internet. 30 years hey! It only seems like yesterday.