Song of the Day: Fun with COEPIS.

It is fall of 1988, maybe spring of ’89.

On the campus of SMSU, there is a BBS run by the Psychology Department. It is called COEPIS.

You can sign in three times a day, assuming you don’t have dummy accounts allowing you to sign in more often, which is sometimes necessary because other people keep posting things that you need to respond to. You could have a dummy account; go in and read what has been posted, prepare your response, and then wait until just after midnight so you can sign in as yourself to post that response.

Not that I have any evidence of, or would condone, such a thing. Nudge nudge, wink wink,

COEPIS lets users see who has signed in recently. Their names are listed from the most recent signer-on backward.

So for instance, if Tom Hanna signed on, then Kevin Whited, then R Bryan Tyra, then me, the list would read:

JOHN HUTCHISON
R TYRA
KEVIN WHITED
TOM HANNA.

I am in R Bryan Tyra’s dorm room on one of the upper floors of Hammons House. It is late in the night. We hadn’t been drinking that night; honest! At that point, I had never seen Mr. Tyra touch a drop of alcohol.

He logs onto COEPIS using the cheap, amber-screened computer that came standard in each room in Hammons House.

“Let me show you something,” he tells me.

He signs into COEPIS as “YEAH YEAH,” then signs out and signs back in as “YOU YEAH.” He signs out again, and then signs back in as “SHE LOVES.” He brings up the Recent Loggers-On screen, and it says:

SHE LOVES
YOU YEAH
YEAH YEAH


One of the more memorable ones I left was

GONNA BUY
ME A
CONDO GONNA
BUY ME
A CUISINART!

You had to be careful and do this at off-peak hours, so nobody would sign in in the middle of your message and mess it up. Because

GONNA BUY
ME A
CONDO GONNA
BOBBY DAHL
BUY ME
A CUISINART!

just ain’t cool.

It wasn’t long after that, and the subsequent messages we left, that the Psychology Department made the Recent Loggers-On page unviewable.

There were a myriad of such messages, mostly partial song lyrics, but today’s song of the day is the Original.