On many occasions, Rocco De Nicola has shown an amazing ability to combine different research topics to offer original results to seemingly different research problems. We review the origins of Klaim, one of the outstanding ideas of Rocco that, around the mid-nineties, emerged as a solution for problems at the confluence of research in process calculi, models of distributed coordination, and languages for network-aware programming. Besides the opportunity to reconstruct Klaim ’s genesis and reflect on its impact, which continues over time, this paper is a sign of our gratitude to Rocco for sharing his ideas, views, and friendship with us.