I am spending time in a small medieval castle in Italy. Many of the walls were here more than 700 years ago. It feels incredibly safe.
Now I am sitting here, connected to the digital world through a narrow-bandwidth wireless router, and manage my Cardano stake pool (server) to make sure it creates blocks when scheduled. Thanks to everybody who worked on building the internet that allows me to accomplish this time-warp.
The other time-warp is that I learned my BSD and System V Unix skills in 1989 when I was responsible for a cluster of Sun workstations and three all shiny brand-new Silicon Graphics personal Iris (super-)computers. Luckily most of these skills translated astonishingly well to 2020's Linux operating system.
For the people who lived here 700 years ago, the castle's walls provided protection and trade, or craftsmanship provided income. For me, the protection comes in the form of cryptography, and revenue comes from producing blocks for the network.
Today my pool, Kontiki, has created its 100th block, five blocks per day on average.
Onward and upward!