A member of the Unix team at Bell Labs, Pike was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language. He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix. Before that, he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981.
He has served as the applicant for AT&T patent number 4555775, or "backing store patent," that is part of the X graphic system protocol. He was once a prominent proponent of software patents. Over the years Pike has written many text editors; SAM and ACME are the most well-known and are still in active use and development.
He is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan. With Ken Thompson, he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying images of faces of email authors.
He appeared once on Late Night with David Letterman, as a technical assistant to the comedy duo Penn and Teller. He later joined Google, where he was involved in the creation of the programming language Go.
