September 5th marks the fifth anniversary of Hack a Day. We hope you’ve had as much fun hacking, reading, and sending us stories as we’ve had sharing them with everyone.

Whether you destroyed your hard drives or built your own web server we tried to keep things interesting over the past year. It was easy at times because of cool parking meter hacks, great advances in the world of hackintosh, and steam powered pleasure devices. But we couldn’t have done any of it without you. So keep reading, don’t forget to send us your hacks, and we’ll serve up the latest and juciest as we find it. We thought about putting up a list of the best hacks we’ve covered over the last five years. We’d rather hear what you think, so please leave a comment to let us know what your favorites have been.

National Geographic has pegged September 2, 2009 as the 40th anniversary of the Internet. They do not cite their source and our source doesn’t make the same claim. But, August 30, 1969 is the date the first Interface Message Processor was delivered to the Arpanet. The IMP is what allowed different computer networks to talk to each other and so it follows that September 2 is probably an acceptable date to celebrate.

To commemorate this glorious day we’re sharing some of our favorite History of the Internet videos. Start with the National Geographic video and then take in the geeky, the new, the old, and the simple.

The Geeky:

[Ethan Zuckerman] walks us through the history as only a geek could. This video starts off with a picture of the guys who invented the IMP which is what facilitated the first information transfer between networks (the Internet). “The Internet as we know it came into being in 1969″.

The New:

A fairly brilliant video presentation of how the Internet developed from several smaller networking projects. Accessible to experts and novices alike.

The Old:

A CBC news report on “The growing phenomenon of: Internet” made in the pre-broadband days. It’s interesting that “the” is missing when they refer to “The Internet”. At 3:25 you can see a lengthy description of what those new-fangled emoticons are all about.

The Simple:

A short animated video that explains IP addresses and how a computer connects to the internet through a service provider.