why bell labs unix is important
-------------------------------

invention of unix, a portable operating system with source code availability
multi-user & multi-tasking
text processing tools such as nroff
stdio
c compiler
fortran compiler
cal calendar 

invention of the original core unix utilities such as:

ar, as, bas, cat, chown, ed, grep, ld, mkdir, msh (mini shell), passwd, rmdir
strip, sum, time, tty, tp, update, write
ls, tar

first 32-bit unix, port to vax, ancestor of all commercial Unix derivatives and BSD
paged virtual memory support (due to vax hardware)
thompson shell, bourne shell
mail for email
yacc, yet another compiler-compiler
lex, lexical parser
uucp, unix-to-unix copy

why BSD is important
--------------------

ex, vi
tcp/ip stack
expand, fold
strings
finger
BIND Berkeley Internet Name Domain
ftp, ntp, ping, telnet, hostname, rlogin, sendmail
iostat reports I/O statistics
more stable API, longer support for older KDE
NetBSD can run on more architectures than Linux 
better support for ZFS
generally better documentation
IRC invented on SunOS which is derived from BSD
Berkeley yacc

Additional Remarks
------------------

X11 predates Linux, see history-of-x.txt 
without Unix there would be no Linux!