Puppet is a software for managing servers, networks, computer security. Martin's team brought most of Walmart's computers under the management of this software, which is no easy task.
As a result, he was a featured speaker at the Puppet 2015 conference, where his team learned to do even more. Thousands were in the audience and watching live stream, including Ma and Pa Kettle.
The techies were quite impressed with the achievement and the speech.
During the speech I had a memory flashback, "Dad, would you help me connect the Atari?" We played on the game computer at first, using cartridges. We moved up to better versions by selling off old toys and the previous version. One time he came home from prep and we hid the latest from him, so he would sleep. I put it together in the early morning and asked him for help in doing something. He was immediately suspicious - as kids tend to be - and came in to see. It was the best graphics and memory of the time, and everyone had a lot of fun with it.
But our initial victory was getting that game computer, selling it to Mrs. I as educational. That was quite true, but we wanted the games. We aimed at her felt needs and made the sale, at Sears, after rehearsing the pitch when she was delayed by talking to hometown friends.
At first very few had a computer at home, so LI went to adult meetings where he grilled Atari fans, chemical engineers, about certain tricks and memory locations. At Northwestern College (RIP), his group loaded network games to the campus computer and erased the evidence when they were done - all at night. That was the start of his interest in networking computers.
Oddly enough, he got me into training when we lived in Phoenix and he was already at Walmart. One person got me into Cisco Network training, and I gave all those books to LI. That prompted his move from Unix scripting to network engineering, where he has continued to learn by accepting all offers for advanced training, often teaching others himself, in such languages as Perl.
