Forest Baskett named Chief Technology Officer at Silicon Graphics

http://www.sgi.com/news/mar_02.html (Silicon Surf Promotional CD, 01/1995)

On February 2, 1994, Silicon Graphics, Inc. announced that Dr. Forest Baskett, senior vice president of research and development, was also named chief technology officer. In this role, Baskett is charged with providing technology leadership, identifying industry trends and developments and pinpointing specific directions to best meet Silicon Graphics' future requirements. The new role was unanimously approved by the company's board of directors and is effective immediately.

"Forest represents high-technology innovation and achievement, mentoring and inspiring engineering teams throughout the industry. A decade after his innovations in RISC technology revolutionized the workstation world, he continues to drive us to extend even further our two-year technical lead," said Edward R. McCracken, chairman and chief executive officer of Silicon Graphics. "He has the keen ability to survey the technology landscape and accurately and appropriately choose the most rewarding path."#011# Since joining Silicon Graphics in 1986, Baskett has led engineering teams in the design of the multiprocessing and graphics structures of Silicon Graphics' systems. Prior to joining the company, he was the director of Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory and held senior research positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Additionally, he was an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University where he continues as a consulting professor, and was an assistant professor of computer science at University of Texas at Austin. Baskett holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in mathematics from Rice University.

Baskett's major technical achievements include the development of one of the first RISC micro-processors, the creation of the first time-sharing operating system on an early supercomputer, the development of one of the first raster scan graphics products, and the creation of a state- of-the-art experimental operating system on the Cray-1 supercomputer at Los Alamos National Lab. He was also the leader of the Sun workstation team and a member of the MIPS(r) microprocessor team at Stanford University.

Baskett is author and co-author of numerous journal and conference proceedings articles on performance and evaluation, computer architecture and graphics workstation architecture. He has been invited to lecture at many leading university and research laboratories working in computer science and computer systems.