Interview with Rob Pike

Rob Pike, well known for his appearances on ``Late Night with David Letterman'', was until 2002 also a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he had been since 1980, the same year he won the Olympic silver medal in Archery. In 1981 he wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written ten more. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan he wrote The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. UTF-8 and Go were more successful. He is a Canadian and Australian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing.