Thirty years ago this week, an event of printing-press proportions took place, though you’d be forgiven at the time for not noticing.

Tim Berners-Lee, a 37-year-old computer scientist was working for CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and was searching for a way for the organisation to share information across its sites in different countries.

The result was the development of the World Wide Web. The Internet itself was a decade old, but was slow, unwieldy and hard to use.

The World Wide Web changed all that: now users could launch a browser, type in a URL and find what they were searching for.

On April 30 1993, Berners-Lee convinced CERN to put the Web into the public domain, royalty-free, a decision that was crucial for its success.

The Internet went from 600 websites in the first year to 60,000 in a couple of years, to over one billion today.

I was at university when the web was launched. We were all given email addresses but had to trudge to the computer room to find a linked-up machine to use them.

In those early years of the web, there was endless talk of a mystical place called the ‘information superhighway’: Ask Jeeves was the go-to search engine, a sort of digital butler who seemed to know the answer to everything, except whatever it was you were looking for.

Suspicions surrounding technology also abounded. At the same time as the Internet took off, so mobile phone use started to proliferate.

Hard to imagine now, but they were seen as a symbol of the well-off and hated by many.

I remember going to Glastonbury in 1994 and Billy Bragg telling a cheering crowd that there was no signal on site. Hurrah!

We all cheered. No mobile coverage! That will stick it to The Man! Today’s generation of music fans would be equally furious if they couldn’t get 5g to Instagram their Glasto experience.

In the last few months, it feels as though technology has taken the next leap forward again, with the advent of AI.

The potential power of ChatGPT is as extraordinary as its growth rate: within five days of its launch, it had a million users.

By March it had over a billion. The implications for how we live and how we work are huge. Why, say, pay someone to write a weekly column for a local newspaper, when you could get a programme to do it instead?

The future, for now, looks more about people working with AI, rather than being replaced by it. But who knows? As Bob Dylan once sang, don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin. The times they are a-changin’ again.