Forest Baskett (born May 11, 1943) is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.^[1]

He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration,^[2] and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.^[3]

Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

He became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1994 for his vision and leadership in the development of hardware and software for high-performance workstations.^[4]

Baskett was the doctoral advisor of computer scientists Alan J. Smith^[5] and Andy Bechtolsheim while at Stanford and was involved in the founding of Sun Microsystems.^[6] He was also the CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D at Silicon Graphics (SGI).^[7]