The World Wide Web has turned 30 years old.

First came the internet, which is a global system of interconnected computer networks – followed by the World Wide Web, which is a global collection of documents and other information linked by hyperlinks and uniform resource identifiers (URI).

Through social media, streaming video and a vast collection of information – the World Wide Web, for better or worse, changed the world and the way we interact with others. And it has come a long way over the past three decades.

“Everything was text-based,” says Rutgers University Professor John Pavlik. “Really just a medium for academics, mostly, to communicate.

Over time it became more advanced – like the launch of YouTube in 2005.

“Now we can do so many things through the web. We can do our banking, we can take courses,” Pavlik says.

Nearly 2 billion websites exist today and roughly half of the world has access.

Software engineer Tim Berners-Lee is the person who first proposed the original idea.