UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.