(to be sung to the tune of American Pie with apologies to both Don McLean and Gigabyte, who indeed make fine motherboards but whose name fitted the lyrics best)

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How computers used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had a box
That I could program like a fox
And, maybe, they'd be useful for a while.

But February made me shiver:
Websites could only deliver
Bad news on the desktop;
Laid my head on the worktop.

I can't remember if I cried
When I left the box up on its side,
But something touched me deep inside,
The day the mobo died.

So bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

Did you write the book of Knuth,
And do you test falsity and truth,
If the compiler tells you so?
Is there a language you extol,
Can coding save your mortal soul,
And d'you use mandat'ry access control? 

Well, I know that your programs are grim
'Cause I saw you writin' code in vim,
You clocked your CPU's
Saw that magic smoke diffuse.

I was a lonely teenage hackin' schmuck
With a 9k modem and a graphics puck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the mobo died.

I started singin',
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

Now for ten years I've been tryin' to pwn
Anything but an IBM clone,
But that's not how it used to be.
When the 'puter ran and I drank caffeine,
And made cool things happen on my screen,
With a keyboard linking you and me,

Oh, and while the net was going down,
The modem blacked out half the town.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No verdict was returned.
And then conductors began to spark
The hard disk heads were made to park,
And I sang dirges in the dark
The day the mobo died.

We were singing,
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
The dust took out the aircon filter,
Eighty-five and rising fast,
The silicon would turn to glass.
The thermal cut-out had failed, alas,
And the graphics card inside would burn up last.

Now the fan-blown air was sweet perfume
While the speakers played a marching tune.
At the screen I took a glance
Oh, but I never got the chance!
'cause of something in my visual field;
The scheduler refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the mobo died? 

We started singing,
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

Oh, and there I was stuck in one place,
A geek cut off from cyberspace
With nothing left to boot again.
So come on: box be working, box be quick!
My box had burned up like a wick,
'Cause clocking is the gamer's only friend.

Oh, and as he passed the final stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No magic rune or spell
Could make that mobo well.
And as the fateful day turned into night
The capacitors still glowed bright
I saw the hand of Fate was not contrite
The day the mobo died.

He was singing,
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

I met a mate with lots to lose
And I asked him for some CPUs
But he just smiled and turned away.
I went down to the hardware store
Where I'd seen the blinking lights before,
But the man there said they had no more today.

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But my LAN had no token,
The computer was broken.
And the three boxen I use the most:
The proxy, NAT, and the file host,
Continued serving Usenet posts,
The day the mobo died.

And they were singing,
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die.
"This'll be the day that I die."

They were singing,
"Bye-bye, Mr. Gigabyte,"
Used my pliers, checked the wires,
But I could not revive.
It fried itself with a voltage way high,
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die."