Mortar (masonry)

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Mortar is a workable paste used to bind building blocks such as stones, bricks, and concrete masonry units together, fill and seal the irregular gaps between them, and sometimes add decorative colors or patterns in masonry walls. In its broadest sense mortar includes pitch, asphalt, and soft mud or clay, such as used between mud bricks. Mortar comes from Latin mortarium meaning crushed.

Cement mortar becomes hard when it cures, resulting in a rigid aggregate structure; however the mortar is intended to be weaker than the building blocks and the sacrificial element in the masonry, because the mortar is easier and less expensive to repair than the building blocks. Mortars are typically made from a mixture of sand, a binder, and water. The most common binder since the early 20th century is Portland cement but the ancient binder lime mortar is still used in some new construction. Lime and gypsum in the form of plaster of Paris are used particularly in the repair and repointing of buildings and structures because it is important the repair materials are similar to the original materials. The type and ratio of the repair mortar is determined by a mortar analysis. There are several types of cement mortars and additives.

Video Mortar (masonry)

Ancient mortar

The first mortars were made of mud and clay. Because of a lack of stone and an abundance of clay, Babylonian constructions were of baked brick, using lime or pitch for mortar. According to Roman Ghirshman, the first evidence of humans using a form of mortar was at the Mehrgarh of Baluchistan in Pakistan, built of sun-dried bricks in 6500 BCE. The ancient sites of Harappan civilization of third millennium BCE are built with kiln-fired bricks and a gypsum mortar. Gypsum mortar, also called plaster of Paris, was used in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and many other ancient structures. It is made from gypsum, which requires a lower firing temperature. It is therefore easier to make than lime mortar and sets up much faster which may be a reason it was used as the typical mortar in ancient, brick arch and vault construction. Gypsum mortar is not as durable as other mortars in damp conditions.

In early Egyptian pyramids, which were constructed during the Old Kingdom (~2600-2500 BCE), the limestone blocks were bound by mortar of mud and clay, or clay and sand. In later Egyptian pyramids, the mortar was made of either gypsum or lime. Gypsum mortar was essentially a mixture of plaster and sand and was quite soft.

In the Indian subcontinent, multiple cement types have been observed in the sites of the Indus Valley Civilization, such as the Mohenjo-daro city-settlement that dates to earlier than 2600 BCE. Gypsum cement that was "light grey and contained sand, clay, traces of calcium carbonate, and a high percentage of lime" was used in the construction of wells, drains and on the exteriors of "important looking buildings." Bitumen mortar was also used at a lower-frequency, including in the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro.

Historically, building with concrete and mortar next appeared in Greece. The excavation of the underground aqueduct of Megara revealed that a reservoir was coated with a pozzolanic mortar 12 mm thick. This aqueduct dates back to c. 500 BCE. Pozzolanic mortar is a lime based mortar, but is made with an additive of volcanic ash that allows it to be hardened underwater; thus it is known as hydraulic cement. The Greeks obtained the volcanic ash from the Greek islands Thira and Nisiros, or from the then Greek colony of Dicaearchia (Pozzuoli) near Naples, Italy. The Romans later improved the use and methods of making what became known as pozzolanic mortar and cement. Even later, the Romans used a mortar without pozzolana using crushed terra cotta, introducing aluminum oxide and silicon dioxide into the mix. This mortar was not as strong as pozzolanic mortar, but, because it was denser, it better resisted penetration by water.

Hydraulic mortar was not available in ancient China, possibly due to a lack of volcanic ash. Around 500 CE, sticky rice soup was mixed with slaked lime to make an inorganic-organic composite sticky rice mortar that had more strength and water resistance than lime mortar.

It is not understood how the art of making hydraulic mortar and cement, which was perfected and in such widespread use by both the Greeks and Romans, was then lost for almost two millennia. During the Middle Ages when the Gothic cathedrals were being built, the only active ingredient in the mortar was lime. Since cured lime mortar can be degraded by contact with water, many structures suffered from wind blown rain over the centuries.

Maps Mortar (masonry)

Ordinary Portland cement mortar

Ordinary Portland cement mortar, commonly known as OPC mortar or just cement mortar, is created by mixing powdered Ordinary Portland Cement, fine aggregate and water.

It was invented in 1794 by Joseph Aspdin and patented on 18 December 1824, largely as a result of efforts to develop stronger mortars. It was made popular during the late nineteenth century, and had by 1930 became more popular than lime mortar as construction material. The advantages of Portland cement is that it sets hard and quickly, allowing a faster pace of construction. Furthermore, fewer skilled workers are required in building a structure with Portland cement.

As a general rule, however, Portland cement should not be used for the repair or repointing of older buildings built in lime mortar, which require the flexibility, softness and breathability of lime if they are to function correctly.

In the United States and other countries, five standard types of mortar (available as dry pre-mixed products) are generally used for both new construction and repair. Strengths of mortar change based on the ratio of cement, lime, and sand used in mortar. The ingredients and the mix ratio for each type of mortars are specified under the ASTM standards. These premixed mortar products are designated by one of the five letters, M, S, N, O, and K. Type M mortar is the strongest, and Type K the weakest. These type letters are apparently taken from the alternate letters of the words "MaSoN wOrK".

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Polymer cement mortar

Polymer cement mortars (PCM) are the materials which are made by partially replacing the cement hydrate binders of conventional cement mortar with polymers. The polymeric admixtures include latexes or emulsions, redispersible polymer powders, water-soluble polymers, liquid thermoset resins and monomers. It has low permeability, and it reduces the incidence of drying shrinkage cracking, mainly designed for repairing concrete structures. One brand of PCM is MagneLine.

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Lime mortar

The setting speed can be increased by using impure limestone in the kiln, to form a hydraulic lime that will set on contact with water. Such a lime must be stored as a dry powder. Alternatively, a pozzolanic material such as calcined clay or brick dust may be added to the mortar mix. Addition of a pozzolanic material will make the mortar set reasonably quickly by reaction with the water.

It would be problematic to use Portland cement mortars to repair older buildings originally constructed using lime mortar. Lime mortar is softer than cement mortar, allowing brickwork a certain degree of flexibility to adapt to shifting ground or other changing conditions. Cement mortar is harder and allows little flexibility. The contrast can cause brickwork to crack where the two mortars are present in a single wall.

Lime mortar is considered breathable in that it will allow moisture to freely move through and evaporate from the surface. In old buildings with walls that shift over time, cracks can be found which allow rain water into the structure. The lime mortar allows this moisture to escape through evaporation and keeps the wall dry. Re-pointing or rendering an old wall with cement mortar stops the evaporation and can cause problems associated with moisture behind the cement.

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Pozzolanic mortar

Pozzolana is a fine, sandy volcanic ash. It was originally discovered and dug at Pozzuoli, nearby Mount Vesuvius in Italy, and was subsequently mined at other sites, too. The Romans learned that pozzolana added to lime mortar allowed the lime to set relatively quickly and even under water. Vitruvius, the Roman architect, spoke of four types of pozzolana. It is found in all the volcanic areas of Italy in various colours: black, white, grey and red. Pozzolana has since become a generic term for any siliceous and/or aluminous additive to slaked lime to create hydraulic cement.

Finely ground and mixed with lime it is a hydraulic cement, like Portland cement, and makes a strong mortar that will also set under water.

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Firestop mortar

Firestop mortars are mortars most typically used to firestop large openings in walls and floors required to have a fire-resistance rating. They are passive fire protection items. Firestop mortars differ in formula and properties from most other cementitious substances and cannot be substituted with generic mortars without violating the listing and approval use and compliance.

Firestop mortar is usually a combination of powder mixed with water, forming a cementatious stone which dries hard. It is sometimes mixed with lightweight aggregates, such as perlite or vermiculite. It is sometimes pigmented to distinguish it from generic materials in an effort to prevent unlawful substitution and to enable verification of the certification listing.

src: c8.alamy.com

Radiocarbon dating

As the mortar hardens, the current atmosphere is encased in the mortar and thus provides a sample for analysis. Various factors affect the sample and raise the margin of error for the analysis,,. The possibility to use radiocarbon dating as a tool for mortar dating was introduced as early as the 1960s, soon after the method was established (Delibrias and Labeyrie 1964; Stuiver and Smith 1965; Folk and Valastro 1976). The very first data were provided by van Strydonck et al. (1983), Heinemeier et al.(1997) and Ringbom and Remmer (1995). Than the methodological aspect were developed by different groups (an international team headed by Åbo Akademi University, and teams from CIRCE, CIRCe, ETHZ, Pozna?, RICH and Milano-Bicocca laboratory. To evaluate the different anthropogenic carbon extraction methods for radiocarbon dating as well as to compare the different dating methods, i.e. radiocarbon and OSL, the first intercomparison study (MODIS) was set up and published in 2017.

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See also

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References

• What Is Mortar - Introduction To Mortar
• Qualities Of Ideal Mortar List - Properties of Good Mortar List
• Uses of Mortar List - Uses of Mortar In Civil Engineering
• Types of Mortars Used In Civil Engineering

• Technical data sheets, Mortar Industry Association, www.mortar.org.uk

Source of article : Wikipedia

Internet censorship circumvention

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Internet censorship circumvention describes various processes used by Internet users to bypass the technical aspects of Internet filtering and gain access to otherwise censored material.

Circumvention is an inherent problem for those wishing to censor the Internet, because filtering and blocking do not remove content from the Internet and as long as there is at least one publicly accessible uncensored system, it will often be possible to gain access to otherwise censored material. However, circumvention may not be very useful to non-tech-savvy users and so blocking and filtering remain effective means of censoring the Internet for many users.

Different techniques and resources are used to bypass Internet censorship, including cached web pages, website mirrors, and archive sites, alternate DNS servers, proxy websites, virtual private networks, sneakernets, and circumvention software tools. Solutions have differing ease of use, speed, security, and risks. Most, however, rely on gaining access to an Internet connection that is not subject to filtering, often in a different jurisdiction not subject to the same censorship laws. According to GlobalWebIndex, over 400 million people use virtual private networks to circumvent censorship or for increased level of privacy.

There are risks to using circumvention software or other methods to bypass Internet censorship. In some countries individuals that gain access to otherwise restricted content may be violating the law, and if caught can be expelled from school, fired from jobs, jailed, or subject to other punishments and loss of access.

Video Internet censorship circumvention

Circumvention, anonymity, risks, and trust

Circumvention and anonymity are different. Circumvention systems are designed to bypass blocking, but they do not usually protect identities. Anonymous systems protect a user's identity. And while they can contribute to circumvention, that is not their primary function. It is important to understand that open public proxy sites do not provide anonymity and can view and record the location of computers making requests as well as the websites accessed.

In many jurisdictions accessing blocked content is a serious crime, particularly content that is considered child pornography, a threat to national security, or an incitement of violence. Thus it is important to understand the circumvention technologies and the protections they do or do not provide and to use only tools that are appropriate in a particular context. Great care must be taken to install, configure, and use circumvention tools properly. Individuals associated with high-profile rights organizations, dissident, protest, or reform groups should take extra precautions to protect their online identities.

Circumvention sites and tools should be provided and operated by trusted third parties located outside the censoring jurisdiction that do not collect identities and other personal information. Best are trusted family and friends personally known to the circumventor, but when family and friends are not available, sites and tools provided by individuals or organizations that are only known by their reputations or through the recommendations and endorsement of others may need to be used. Commercial circumvention services may provide anonymity while surfing the Internet, but could be compelled by law to make their records and users' personal information available to law enforcement.

Maps Internet censorship circumvention

Methods

There are many methods available that may allow the circumvention of Internet filtering. They range from the simple to the complex and from the trivial to the difficult in terms of implementation. Of course, not all methods will work to bypass all filters. And censorship tools and sites are themselves subject to censorship and monitoring.

Circumventing censorship using proxies gives access to international content, but doesn't address domestic censorship and access to more local content. Nor does it offer a defense against DDoS or other attacks that target a publisher.

Cached pages

Some search engines keep cached pages, copies of previously indexed Web pages, and these pages are not always blocked. Cached pages may be identified with a small link labeled "cached" in a list of search results. Google allows the retrieval of cached pages by entering "cache:some-blocked-url" as a search request.

Mirror and archive sites

Copies of web sites or pages may be available at mirror or archive sites such as www.archive.org and the alternate sites may not be blocked. InterPlanetary File System is a permanent, open-source, decentralized and resilient technology of storing and sharing files, e. g. used by activists during the 2017 block of Wikipedia in Turkey.

Web-to-e-mail services

Web-to-e-mail services will return the contents of web pages with or without images as an e-mail message and such access may not be blocked.

RSS aggregators

RSS aggregators such as Google Reader and Bloglines may be able to receive and pass on RSS feeds that are blocked when accessed directly.

IP addresses and domain names

Alternative domain names may not be open. For example, the following domain names all refer to the same web site: http://wikimedia.org, http://www.wikimedia.org, https://web.archive.org/web/20120224022641/http://text.wikimedia.org/, and https://web.archive.org/web/20120224030658/http://text.pmtpa.wikimedia.org/ .

Or alternative URLs may not be open. For example: www.open.com vs. www.open.com/, blocked.com, open.com/, www.open.com/index.htm, and www.open.com/index.html.

Entering an IP address rather than a domain name (http://208.80.152.2) or a domain name rather than an IP address (http://wikimedia.org) will sometimes allow access to a blocked site.

Specifying an IP address in a base other than 10 may bypass some filters. The following URLs all access the same site, although not all browsers will recognize all forms: http://208.80.152.2 (dotted decimal), http://3494942722 (decimal), http://0320.0120.0230.02 (dotted octal), http://0xd0509802 (hexadecimal), and http://0xd0.0x50.0x98.0x2 (dotted hexadecimal).

Alternative DNS servers

Using DNS servers other than those supplied by default by an ISP may bypass DNS-based blocking. OpenDNS and Google offer DNS services or see List of Publicly Available and Completely Free DNS Servers.

Proxy websites

Proxy websites are often the simplest and fastest way to access banned websites in censored nations. Such websites work by being themselves un-blocked, but capable of displaying the blocked material. This is usually accomplished by entering a URL which the proxy website will fetch and display. Using the https protocol is recommended since it is encrypted and harder to block. A list of web proxies is available from web sites such as http://www.proxy.org/ or by searching for "free web proxy". Most modern web browsers have preferences or allow plug-ins to enable proxies.

The mobile Opera Mini browser uses a proxy-based approach employing encryption and compression in order to speed up downloads. This has the side effect of allowing it to circumvent several approaches to Internet censorship. In 2009 this led the government of China to ban all but a special Chinese version of the browser.

Reverse proxy

A reverse proxy is (usually) an Internet-facing proxy used as a front end to control and protect access to a server on a private network, commonly also performing tasks such as load-balancing, authentication, decryption or caching. Websites could use reverse proxy to reroute traffic to avoid censorship.

Virtual private networks (VPNs)

Using virtual private networks, a user who experiences internet censorship can create a secure connection to a more permissive country, and browse the internet as if they were situated in that country. Some services are offered for a monthly fee; others are ad-supported.

SSH tunneling

By establishing an SSH tunnel, a user can forward all their traffic over an encrypted channel, so both outgoing requests for blocked sites and the response from those sites are hidden from the censors, for whom it appears as unreadable SSH traffic.

Sneakernets

A sneakernet is the transfer of electronic information, especially computer files, by physically carrying data on storage media from one place to another. A sneakernet can move data regardless of network restrictions simply by not using the network at all.

Hybrid combinations

It is also possible to combine multiple methods to hybrid methods, e.g., a smart DNS proxy server is a hybrid method (employing alternative DNS servers and VPNs) often used to circumvent geo-blocking.

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Software

Types:

CGI proxies use a script running on a web server to perform the proxying function. A CGI proxy client sends the requested url embedded within the data portion of an HTTP request to the CGI proxy server. The CGI proxy server pulls the ultimate destination information from the data embedded in the HTTP request, sends out its own HTTP request to the ultimate destination, and then returns the result to the proxy client. A CGI proxy tool's security can be trusted as far as the operator of the proxy server can be trusted. CGI proxy tools require no manual configuration of the browser or client software installation, but they do require that the user use an alternative, potentially confusing browser interface within the existing browser.

HTTP proxies send HTTP requests through an intermediate proxying server. A client connecting through an HTTP proxy sends exactly the same HTTP request to the proxy as it would send to the destination server unproxied. The HTTP proxy parses the HTTP request; sends its own HTTP request to the ultimate destination server; and then returns the response back to the proxy client. An HTTP proxy tool's security can be trusted as far as the operator of the proxy server can be trusted. HTTP proxy tools require either manual configuration of the browser or client side software that can configure the browser for the user. Once configured, an HTTP proxy tool allows the user transparently to use his normal browser interface.

Application proxies are similar to HTTP proxies, but support a wider range of online applications.

Peer-to-peer systems store content across a range of participating volunteer servers combined with technical techniques such as re-routing to reduce the amount of trust placed on volunteer servers or on social networks to establish trust relationships between server and client users. Peer-to-peer system can be trusted as far as the operators of the various servers can be trusted or to the extent that the architecture of the peer-to-peer system limits the amount of information available to any single server and the server operators can be trusted not to cooperate to combine the information they hold.

Re-routing systems send requests and responses through a series of proxying servers, encrypting the data again at each proxy, so that a given proxy knows at most either where the data came from or is going to, but not both. This decreases the amount of trust required of the individual proxy hosts.

src: ooni.torproject.org

Shadow Internet and cell phone networks

In June 2011 the New York Times reported that the U.S. is engaged in a "global effort to deploy 'shadow' Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks."

src: www.washingtonpost.com

See also

• Anonymous P2P
• Bypassing content-control filters
• Bypassing the Great Firewall of China
• Computer surveillance
• Content-control software
• Cypherpunk
• Crypto-anarchism
• Electronic Frontier Foundation - an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization
• Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) - a consortium of organizations that develop and deploy anti-censorship technologies
• Internet privacy
• Meshnet
• Open Technology Fund (OTF) - a U.S. Government funded program created in 2012 at Radio Free Asia to support global Internet freedom technologies
• Proxy list
• Tactical Technology Collective - a non-profit foundation promoting the use of free and open source software for non-governmental organizations, and producers of NGO-in-A-Box

src: upload.wikimedia.org

References

src: www.slate.com

External links

• Casting A Wider Net: Lessons Learned in Delivering BBC Content on the Censored Internet, Ronald Deibert, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, 11 October 2011
• Censorship Wikia, an anti-censorship site that catalogs past and present censored works, using verifiable sources, and a forum to discuss organizing against and circumventing censorship
• "Circumvention Tool Evaluation: 2011", Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Palfrey, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, 18 August 2011
• "Circumvention Tool Usage Report: 2010", Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, 14 October 2010
• Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders, by Dmitri Vitaliev, Published by Front Line - The International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
• "Digital Tools to Curb Snooping", New York Times, 17 July 2013
• "DNS Nameserver Swapping", Methods and Scripts useful for evading censorship through DNS filtering
• How to Bypass Internet Censorship, also known by the titles: Bypassing Internet Censorship or Circumvention Tools, a FLOSS Manual, 10 March 2011, 240 pp. Translations have been published in Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Persian, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese
• Internet censorship wiki, provides information about different methods of access filtering and ways to bypass them
• "Leaping over the Firewall: A Review of Censorship Circumvention Tools", by Cormac Callanan (Ireland), Hein Dries-Ziekenheiner (Netherlands), Alberto Escudero-Pascual (Sweden), and Robert Guerra (Canada), Freedom House, April 2011
• "Media Freedom Internet Cookbook" by the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Vienna, 2004
• "Online Survival Kit", We Fight Censorship project of Reporters Without Borders
• "Selected Papers in Anonymity", Free Haven Project, accessed 16 September 2011
• "Ten Things to Look for in a Circumvention Tool", Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project, September 2010

Source of article : Wikipedia

CompuServe

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CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was the first major commercial online service provider in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major influence through the mid-1990s. At its peak in the early 1990s, CIS was known for its online chat system, message forums covering a variety of topics, extensive software libraries for most computer platforms, and a series of popular online games, notably MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai. It also was known for its introduction of the GIF format for pictures, and as a GIF exchange mechanism.

AOL's entry into the PC market in 1991 marked the beginning of the end for CIS. AOL charged $2.95 an hour versus $5.00 an hour for Compuserve, until 1996, when AOL switched to a monthly subscription instead of hourly rates, so for active users AOL was much less expensive. AOL also used a GUI-based client, and while such systems existed for CIS, it only supported a subset of the system's functionality and was purchased separately. In response, CIS lowered its hourly rates on several occasions. The number of users grew, peaking at 3 million in April 1995. By this point AOL had over 20 million users in the United States alone, but this was off their peak of 27 million, due to customers leaving for lower-cost offerings. CIS finally introduced monthly pricing in late 1997, but by that time the number of users leaving all online services for dialup Internet service providers was reaching a climax.

In 1997, CIS's parent company, H&R Block, announced its desire to sell the company. A complex deal was worked out with WorldCom acting as a broker, resulting in CIS being sold to AOL. While continuing the original service, renamed CompuServe Classic, AOL also used the CompuServe brand for several low-cost offerings; CompuServe 2000 was a rebranded AOL client with separate services, while CompuServe Dialer was a low-cost dialup ISP. CompuServe Classic shut down in 2009, CompuServe 2000 followed suit in 2011. CompuServe Dialer continues to operate as a Web portal. In 2015 Verizon acquired AOL, including its CompuServe division. In 2017 after Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo, CompuServe became part of Verizon's newly formed Oath Inc. subsidiary.

Video CompuServe

History

Founding

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. (the earliest advertising shows the name with initial caps) in Columbus, Ohio, as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance. While Jeffrey Wilkins, the son-in-law of Golden United founder Harry Gard, Sr., is widely credited as the first president of CompuServe, the initial president was actually Dr. John R. Goltz. Goltz and Wilkins were both graduate students in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona. Early employees also recruited from the University of Arizona included Sandy Trevor (inventor of the CompuServe CB Simulator chat system), Doug Chinnock, and Larry Shelley. Wilkins replaced Goltz as CEO within the first year of operation.

The company objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing support to Golden United Life Insurance; and to develop as an independent business in the computer time-sharing industry, by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours. It was spun off as a separate company in 1975, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol CMPU.

Concurrently, the company recruited executives who shifted the focus from offering time-sharing services, in which customers wrote their own applications, to one that was focused on packaged applications. The first of these new executives was Robert Tillson, who left Service Bureau Corporation (then a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, but originally formed as a division of IBM) to become CompuServe's Executive Vice President of Marketing. He then recruited Charles McCall (who followed Jeff Wilkins as CEO, and later became CEO of medical information firm HBO & Co.), Maury Cox (who became CEO after the departure of McCall), and Robert Massey (who followed Cox as CEO). Barry Berkov was recruited from Xerox to head product development and marketing.

In 1977, CompuServe's board changed the company's name to CompuServe Incorporated. In 1980, H&R Block acquired CompuServe.

Technology

The original 1969 dial-up technology was fairly simple--the local phone number in Cleveland, for example, was a line connected to a time-division multiplexer that connected via a leased line to a matched multiplexer in Columbus that was connected to a time-sharing host system. In the earliest buildups, each line terminated on a single machine at CompuServe's host, so different numbers had to be used to reach different computers.

Later, the central multiplexers in Columbus were replaced with PDP-8 minicomputers, and the PDP-8s were connected to a DEC PDP-15 minicomputer that acted as switches so a phone number was not tied to a particular destination host. Finally, CompuServe developed its own packet switching network, implemented on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers acting as network nodes that were installed throughout the US (and later, in other countries) and interconnected. Over time, the CompuServe network evolved into a complicated multi-tiered network incorporating Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Frame relay (FR), Internet Protocol (IP) and X.25 technologies.

In 1981, The Times explained CompuServe's technology in one sentence:

CompuServe is offering a video-text-like service permitting personal computer users to retrieve software from the mainframe computer over telephone lines.

CompuServe was also a world leader in other commercial services. One of these was the Financial Services group, which collected and consolidated financial data from myriad data feeds, including CompuStat, Disclosure, I/B/E/S as well as the price/quote feeds from the major exchanges. CompuServe developed extensive screening and reporting tools that were used by many investment banks on Wall Street.

CIS

In 1978, Radio Shack marketed the residential information service MicroNET, in which home users accessed the computers during evening hours, when the CompuServe computers were otherwise idle. Its success prompted CompuServe to drop the MicroNET name in favor of its own. CompuServe's origin was approximately concurrent with that of The Source. Both services were operating in early 1979, being the first online services. MicroNet was made popular through the Issue 2 of Commodore Disk User, which included instructions on how to connect and run MicroNet programs.

By the mid-1980s, CompuServe was one of the largest information and networking services companies, and it was the largest consumer information service. It operated commercial branches in more than 30 US cities, selling primarily network services to major corporations throughout the United States. Consumer accounts could be bought in most computer stores (a box with an instruction manual and a trial account login) and awareness of this service was extremely high. By 1987, the consumer side would be 50% of CompuServe revenues. The service continued to improve in terms of user interface and offerings, and in 1989 CompuServe purchased and dismantled one of its main competitors, The Source.

The corporate culture was entrepreneurial, encouraging "skunkworks projects". Alexander "Sandy" Trevor secluded himself for a weekend, writing the "CB Simulator", a chat system that soon became one of CIS's most popular features. Instead of hiring employees to manage the forums, they contracted with sysops, who received compensation based on the success of their own forum's boards, libraries, and chat areas.

Newspapers

In July 1980, working with The Associated Press, CompuServe began hosting text versions of the Columbus Dispatch. The New York Times, Virginian-Pilot and Ledger Star, The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times were added in 1981 to what became known as the CompuServe Experiment. Additional newspapers followed, bringing the total number of different newspapers available to subscribers to eleven.

According to an editor involved in the project, accessing the articles in these newspapers made up 5% of CompuServe's traffic. Reading an entire newspaper using this method was impractical, however. The text of a $0.20 print edition newspaper would take two to six hours to download at a cost of $5 per hour (after 6 p.m.).

Selling connectivity

Another major unit of CompuServe, the CompuServe Network Services, was formed in 1982 to generate revenue by selling connectivity on the nationwide packet network CompuServe had built to support its time-sharing service. CompuServe designed and manufactured its own network processors, based on the DEC PDP-11, and wrote all the software that ran in the network. Often (and erroneously) called an X.25 network, the CompuServe network implemented a mixture of standardized and proprietary layers throughout the network.

One of the proprietary layers was called Adaptive Routing. The Adaptive Routing system implemented two powerful features. One is that the network operated entirely in a self-discovery mode. When a new switch was added to the network by connecting it to a neighbor via a leased telephone circuit, the new switch was discovered and absorbed into the network without explicit configuration. To change the network configuration, all that was needed was to add or remove connections, and the network would automatically reconfigure. The second feature implemented by Adaptive Routing was often talked about in network engineering circles, but was implemented only by CNS - establishing connection paths on the basis of real-time performance measurements. As one circuit became busy, traffic was diverted to alternative paths to prevent overloading and poor performance for users.

While the CNS network was not itself based on the X.25 protocol, the network presented a standard X.25 interface to the outside world, providing dialup connectivity to corporate hosts, and allowing CompuServe to form alliances with private networks Tymnet and Telenet, among others. This gave CompuServe the largest selection of local dial-up phone connections in the world, in an era when network usage charges were expensive, but still lower than long distance charges. Other networks permitted CompuServe access to still more locations, including international locations, usually with substantial connect-time surcharges. It was common in the early 1980s to pay a $30-per-hour charge to connect to CompuServe, which at the time cost $5 to $6 per hour before factoring in the connect-time surcharges. This resulted in the company being nicknamed CompuSpend, Compu$erve or CI$.

CNS has been the primary supplier of dial-up communications for credit-card authorizations for more than 20 years, a competence developed through its long relationship with Visa International. At the peak of this line of business, CompuServe carried millions of authorization transactions each month, representing several billion dollars of consumer purchase transactions. For many businesses an always-on connection was an extravagance, and a dialup option made better sense. Today this service remains in operation, deeply embedded within Verizon (see below). There are no other competitors remaining in this market.

The company was notable for introducing a number of online services to personal computer users. CompuServe began offering electronic mail capabilities and technical support to commercial customers in 1978 under the name Infoplex, and was also a pioneer in the real-time chat market with its CB Simulator service introduced on February 21, 1980 as the first public, commercial multi-user chat program. CompuServe also introduced a number of online games.

File transfers

Around 1981, CompuServe introduced its CompuServe B protocol, a file-transfer protocol, allowing users to send files to each other. This was later expanded to the higher-performance B+ version, intended for downloads from CIS itself. Although the B+ protocol was not widely supported by other software, it was used by default for some time on CIS itself. The B+ protocol was later extended to include the Host-Micro Interface (HMI), a mechanism for communicating commands and transaction requests to a server application running on the mainframes. HMI could be used by "front end" client software to present a GUI-based interface to CIS, without having to use the error-prone CLI to route commands.

CompuServe began to expand its reach outside the United States. It entered the international arena in Japan in 1986 with Fujitsu and Nissho Iwai, and developed a Japanese-language version of CompuServe called NIFTY-Serve in 1989. In 1993, CompuServe Hong Kong was launched in a joint venture with Hutchison Telecom and was able to acquire 50,000 customers before the dialup ISP frenzy. Between 1994 and 1995 Fujitsu and CompuServe co-developed WorldsAway, an interactive virtual world. As of 2014 the original world that launched on CompuServe in 1995, known as the Dreamscape, is still operating.

In the late 1980s, it was possible to log on to CompuServe via worldwide X.25 packet switching networks, which bridged onto CompuServe's existing US-based network. Gradually it introduced its own direct dialup access network in many countries, a more economical solution. With its network expansion, CompuServe also extended the marketing of its commercial services, opening branches in London and Munich.

Internet

CompuServe was the first online service to offer Internet connectivity, albeit with limited access, as early as 1989 when it connected its proprietary e-mail service to allow incoming and outgoing messages to be exchanged with Internet-based e-mail addresses.

In the early 1990s, CompuServe had hundreds of thousands of users visiting its thousands of moderated forums, forerunners to the discussion sites on the Web. (Like the Web, many forums were managed by independent producers who then administered the forum and recruited moderators, called sysops.) Among these were many in which hardware and software companies offered customer support. This broadened the audience from primarily business users to the technical "geek" crowd, some of whom migrated over from Byte Magazine's Bix online service.

Over time, CompuServe also attracted the general public with a wide spectrum of Forums devoted to interests such as show business, including Entertainment Drive, CompuServe's sole content investment, current events, sports, politics, aviation, and more. In 1992, CompuServe and Eliot Stein's ShowBiz Forum hosted the industry's first electronic movie press kit, for the Universal computer-themed feature film Sneakers; the film's director, Phil Alden Robinson, participated in online chats with ShowBiz Forum members to promote the picture.

Unlike AOL (and before they merged), in the early 1990s CompuServe aggressively recruited membership even from peripheral groups which had the potential to attract followings, offering moderators free access to the network as an incentive. One such group was Military Brats of America, an organization of individuals who were raised in the US military. MBA received an unsolicited invitation to join CompuServe at no cost, including universal free access for its founder. CompuServe set up a dedicated bulletin board for MBA which became central to the group's daily operation. To access the discussions, MBA members were required to join the network as paying customers. This was in contrast to AOL, which repeatedly denied MBA a dedicated bulletin board, and offered no free access to any MBA member. As a workaround, MBA was able to establish a subsidiary bulletin board within the Vietnam Veterans of America AOL portal, thereby piggybacking with a more established group which did enjoy preferred AOL treatment. In that way, MBA had a jury-rigged presence on the AOL service, but no preferential benefits. All MBA members, including the group's leader, paid full AOL membership rates to access the VVA/MBA AOL community.

In 1992, CompuServe hosted the first known WYSIWYG e-mail content and forum posts. Fonts, colors and emoticons were encoded into 7-bit text-based messages via the third party product NavCIS (Dvorak Development) running on DOS and Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 operating systems. NavCIS included features for offline work, similar to offline readers used with Bulletin board systems, allowing users to connect to the service and exchange new mail and forum content in a largely automated fashion. Once the "run" was complete, the user edited their messages locally in offline mode. The system also allowed interactive navigation of the system to support services like the chat system. Many of these services remained text based.

CompuServe later introduced CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) to compete more directly with AOL. Unlike Navigator, CIM was tuned for online work, and used a point-and-click interface very similar to AOLs. Later versions interacted with the hosts using the HMI communications protocol. For some areas of the service which did not support HMI, the older text-based interface could be used. WinCIM also allowed caching of forum messages, news articles and e-mail, so that reading and posting could be performed off-line, without incurring hourly connect costs. Previously, this was a luxury of the NavCIS, AutoSIG and TapCIS applications for power users.

One of the big advantages of CIS over the Internet was that the users could purchase services and software from other CompuServe members using their CompuServe account.

During the early 1990s the hourly rate fell from over $10 an hour to $1.95 an hour. In March 1992, it launched online signups with credit card based payments and a desktop application to connect online and check emails. In April 1995, CompuServe topped three million members, still the largest online service provider, and launched its NetLauncher service, providing WWW access capability via the Spry Mosaic browser. AOL, however, introduced a far cheaper flat-rate, unlimited-time, advertisement-supported price plan in the US to compete with CompuServe's hourly charges. In conjunction with AOL's marketing campaigns, this caused a significant loss of customers until CompuServe responded with a similar plan of its own at $24.95 per month in late 1997.

As the World Wide Web grew in popularity with the general public, company after company closed their once-busy CompuServe customer support forums to offer customer support to a larger audience directly through company websites, an area which the CompuServe forums of the time could not address because they had not yet introduced universal WWW access.

In 1992 CompuServe acquired Mark Cuban's company, MicroSolutions.

In 1997 CompuServe began converting its forums from its proprietary Host-Micro Interface (HMI) to HTML web standards. The 1997 change discontinued text based access to the forums, but the forums were accessible both through the web as well as thorough CompuServe's proprietary HMI protocol. In 2004 CompuServe discontinued HMI and converted the forums to web access only. The forums remained active on CompuServe.com until the end of 2017.

Maps CompuServe

CompuServe UK

Before the widespread adoption of the Internet and World Wide Web, the United Kingdom's first national major-brands online shopping service was developed by the UK arm of CompuServe/CIS as part of its proprietary closed-system collection of consumer services.

Andrew Gray set up CompuServe UK's operations as the European arm of the US company back in the late 1980s and later became the company's European general manager, while David Gilroy was CompuServe's UK director of customer services. The service continued to grow and offered technical support managed by Suzanne Gautier and sales managed by Colin Campbell.

The service was proposed by Paul Stanfield, an independent business-to-consumer electronic commerce consultant, to Martin Turner, Product Marketing Director for CIS UK, in August 1994. Turner agreed and the project started in September with rapid market research, product development and sales of online space to major UK retail and catalogue companies. These included WH Smith, Tesco, Virgin/Our Price, Great Universal Stores/GUS, Interflora, Dixons Retail, Past Times, PC World (retailer) and Innovations.

The service launched on Thursday 27 April 1995 with Paul Stanfield's purchase of a book from the WH Smith shop. This was a repeat of the first formal test of the service on 9 February 1995, which included secure payment and subsequent fulfilment of the order by Royal Mail postal delivery. Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), the UK's industry association for e-retailing, believes that the UK's first national shopping service secure online transaction was the purchase of a WH Smith book from the CompuServe centre.

Approximately 1,000,000 UK customers had access to the shops at that time and it was British retailers' first major exposure to the medium. Other retailers joined the service soon after and included Sainsbury's Wine and Jaguar Cars (branded lifestyle goods).

CompuServe UK commissioned writer Sue Schofield to produce a 'retail' pack including a new UK CompuServe Book and a free CD-ROM containing the CIS software to access the service.

CompuServe, with its closed private network system, was slow to react to the rapid development of the open World Wide Web and it was not long before major UK retailers started to develop their own web sites independently of CompuServe.

src: synthroom.com

User IDs and e-mail addresses

The original CompuServe user IDs consisted of seven octal digits in the form 7xxxx,xx - a legacy of PDP-10 architecture - (later eight and nine octal digits in the form 7xxxx,xxx and 7xxxx,xxxx and finally ten octal digits in the form 1xxxxx,xxxx) that were generated in advance and issued on printed "Snap Paks".

From 1989, CompuServe users had email access to the Internet, using their user ID in the form xxxxx.xxxx@compuserve.com - where the comma in the original ID was replaced with a period. In 1996, users were allowed to create an alias for their Internet e-mail address, which could also be used for a personal web page; the longest-term members were allowed first choice of the new addresses. In 1998, users were offered the option of switching their mailbox to a newer system that provided POP3 access via the Internet, so that any Internet mail program could be used. Current CompuServe email addresses look like XXXXXX@cs.com for users of the CompuServe 2000 service.

src: images.fastcompany.net

Custom portals

CompuServe has a long history offering a custom portal of the CompuServe Information Service to the airline industry. Beginning in the 1970s, CompuServe offered a customized version of its service that allows pilots and flight attendants to bid for flight schedules with their airline. CompuServe offered customized solutions to other industries as well, including a service called CompuServe for Lawyers.

src: www.ameyer.ch

Market share

Long the largest online service provider, by 1987 CompuServe had 380,000 subscribers, compared to 320,000 at the Dow Jones News/Retrieval, 80,000 at The Source, and 70,000 at GEnie.

src: consumerist.com

Technology and law

One popular use of CompuServe in the 1980s was file exchange, particularly pictures. Indeed, in 1985 it hosted perhaps the first online comic in the world, Witches and Stitches. CompuServe introduced a simple black-and-white image format known as RLE (run-length-encoding) to standardize the images so they could be shared among different microcomputer platforms. With the introduction of more powerful machines, universally supporting color, CompuServe introduced the much more capable GIF format, invented by Steve Wilhite. GIF went on to become the de facto standard for 8-bit images on the Internet in the early and mid-1990s.

CompuServe, and its outside telecommunications attorney, Randy May, led the appeals before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to exempt data networks from having to pay the Common Carrier Access Charge (CCAC) that was levied by the telephone Local Exchange Carriers (primarily the Baby Bell companies) on long distance carriers. The primary argument was that data networking was a brand new industry, and the country would be better served by not exposing this important new industry to the aberrations of the voice telephone economics (the CCAC is the mechanism used to subsidize the cost of local telephone service from long distance revenue). The FCC agreed with CompuServe's position, and the consequence is that all dial-up networking in the United States, whether on private networks or the public Internet, is much less expensive than it otherwise would have been.

In 1991, CompuServe was sued for defamation in one of the early cases testing the application of traditional law on the Internet in Cubby v. CompuServe. Although defamatory content was posted on one of its forums, CompuServe was not liable for this content because it was unaware of the content and did not exercise editorial control over the forum.

In 1995, CompuServe blocked access to sex-oriented newsgroups after being pressured by Bavarian prosecutors. In 1997, after CompuServe reopened the newsfeeds, Felix Somm, the former managing director for CompuServe Germany, was charged with violating German child pornography laws because of the material CompuServe's network was carrying into Germany. He was convicted and sentenced to two years' probation on May 28, 1998. He was cleared on appeal on November 17, 1999. The requirement for censorship in Germany led some German members to leave the service.

src: www.cerm.info

WOW!

In 1996, CEO Maury Cox began the WOW! initiative within CompuServe. The objective was to create a new generation of home information services that could be built on the revenue models brought to the market by AOL and to offer users a new rich visual experience. WOW! was the first Internet service to be offered with a monthly "unlimited" rate ($17.95), and stood out because of its brightly colored, seemingly hand-drawn pages. The WOW! service would also implement a parental control technology so that parents could limit and monitor the online activities of their children. A key component of this was a 'white list' of websites that had been vetted by a team of CompuServe editors to ensure that the sites had content appropriate for children. The service was widely advertised on TV as a family-friendly service.

The WOW! team was designed to be a "skunkworks project", with its core marketing and technology teams housed at a location away from the CompuServe corporate headquarters. Most of the leadership and team, headed by Scott Kauffman formerly of Time Warner, was recruited from outside the company.

To fund WOW!, Cox convinced H&R Block that the equity capital market should be tapped through a public stock offering. Block agreed, and subsequently 20% of CompuServe was sold via an Initial Public Offering (IPO), raising nearly $200 million for the company.

WOW! was not successful. CompuServe's traditional customers were not enthusiastic about the new user interface, which required the Microsoft Windows platform. The first release of this program was buggy, with many random shutdowns of the service and loss of e-mail messages. CompuServe shut down the service on January 31, 1997.

src: microship.com

WorldCom acquisition and deal with AOL

The battle for customers between AOL and CompuServe became one of handing customers back and forth, using free hours and other enticements. There were technical problems--the thousands of new generation U.S. Robotics dialup modems deployed in the network would crash under high call volumes. For the first time in decades, CompuServe began losing money, and at a prodigious rate. An effort, code-named "Red-Dog", was initiated to convert CompuServe's long-time PDP-10 based technologies over to servers based on Intel x86 architectures and the Microsoft Windows NT operating system.

H&R Block was going through its own management changes at the same time. Henry Bloch retired as CEO, and his son, Tom Bloch, was named as his successor. When Tom Bloch resigned to become a public school teacher, he was replaced by Richard Brown, who had formerly been one of the top executives of Ameritech. Dick Brown soon left to take the job as CEO of EDS, and the H&R Block Board of Directors appointed Frank Salizzoni, a member of the HRB Board, to serve as CEO of H&R Block. It was during Salizzoni's tenure as CEO that H&R Block's Board of Directors made the decision to divest CompuServe. Maury Cox left the helm as CompuServe's CEO, to be replaced by Bob Massey. Massey had a short tenure in this role, and was relieved in 1997. Frank Salizzoni became the acting CEO of CompuServe from this time until its sale.

In 1997, H&R Block announced its intention to divest itself of CompuServe. A number of potential buyers came to the forefront, but the terms they offered were unacceptable to H&R Block management. One would have involved a leveraged buyout which would have saddled the CompuServe shareholders with substantial debt. AOL, the most likely buyer, made several offers to purchase CompuServe using AOL stock, but H&R Block management sought cash, or at least a higher quality stock.

In February 1998, John W. Sidgmore, then vice chairman of WorldCom, and the former CEO of UUNET, devised a complex transaction which ultimately met the goals of all parties. Step one was that WorldCom purchased all the shares of CompuServe with $1.2 billion of WCOM stock. Literally the next day, WorldCom sold the CompuServe Information Service portion of the company to AOL, retaining the CompuServe Network Services portion. AOL in turn sold its networking division, Advanced Network Services (ANS), to WorldCom. Sidgmore said that at this point the world was in balance: the accountants were doing taxes, AOL was doing information services, and WorldCom was doing networks.

The only reason the H&R Block management team agreed to accept WCOM stock in exchange for the ownership of CompuServe was they had worked out a deal to sell the WCOM stock for $1.2 billion in cash immediately after the transaction. In the end, H&R Block received $1.2 billion for a company it had paid $20 million for eighteen years earlier, and from which it had also generated substantial profits during its period of ownership.

After the WorldCom acquisition, CompuServe Network Services was renamed WorldCom Advanced Networks, and continued to operate as a discrete company within WorldCom after being combined with AOL's network subsidiary, ANS, and an existing WorldCom networking company called Gridnet. In 1999, Worldcom acquired MCI and became MCI WorldCom, WorldCom Advanced Networks briefly became MCI WorldCom Advanced Networks. WorldCom was later unsuccessful in its bid to purchase Sprint. MCI WorldCom Advanced Networks was ultimately absorbed into UUNET. Soon thereafter, WorldCom began its spiral to bankruptcy, re-emerging as MCI. In 2006, MCI was sold to Verizon. As a result, the organization that had once been the networking business within CompuServe is now part of Verizon Business.

In the process of splitting CompuServe into its two major businesses, CompuServe Information Services and CompuServe Network Services, WorldCom and AOL both desired to make use of the CompuServe name and trademarks. Consequently, a jointly owned holding company was formed for no other purpose than to hold title to various trademarks, patents and other intellectual property, and to license that intellectual property at no cost to both WorldCom (now Verizon) and AOL.

In 2015, when Verizon acquired AOL, all of CompuServe's original properties were reunited under Verizon.

src: newspuddle.com

Post-AOL acquisition

In September 2003 CompuServe Information Service, which had become a division of AOL, added CompuServe Basic to its product lines, selling via Netscape.com. AOL offered the CompuServe Basic service to departing AOL members, possibly in response to reports earlier that year that AOL was losing significant business to low-cost competitors.

CompuServe Information Services was then positioned as the value market-provider for several million customers, as part of the AOL Web Products Group. Recent U.S. versions of the CompuServe client software -- essentially an enhanced Web browser -- use the Gecko layout engine (developed for Mozilla) within a derivative of the AOL client and using the AOL dialup network. The previous CompuServe service offering, re-branded as "CompuServe Classic", remains available in the US and also in other countries where CompuServe 2000 is not offered, such as the UK. In Germany, CompuServe 2000 was introduced in 1999 and withdrawn in 2001 because of failure on the German market, but the CompuServe Classic service also remains available. However, since then CompuServe Germany has introduced its own products for dialup and DSL internet access, and its own client software (called CompuServe 4.5 light).

In January 2007, the CompuServe brand managers at AOL sent an e-mail to members stating that it had no plans for compatibility with the Windows Vista operating system, and suggested that its members who wished to use Vista switch to the AOL-branded service. Like many older programs, however, CompuServe client software can run under Windows Vista in compatibility mode. In July 2007, CompuServe Pacific announced the cessation of its operations on August 31, 2007. In September 2007, it was announced that CompuServe France would close down its operations on November 30, 2007. In the Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand, etc.) Fujitsu Australia ran the CompuServe Pacific franchise, which in 1998 had 35,000 customers. Towards the end of its operations in that area, it was thought to have far fewer because of CompuServe Pacific's pricing plans, which have not been changed since 1998 (e.g., A$14.95 for 2 hours per month). In July 2008, CompuServe Germany informed its customers that it would close down its operations on July 31, 2008. Its legacy service "CompuServe Classic" would not be affected by this decision.

CompuServe forums as of 2013 are more tightly linked to CompuServe channels. Compuserve.com currently runs a slightly trimmed-down version of the now-defunct Netscape.com Web portal, the latter of which was shut down in 2006.

CompuServe announced on April 15, 2009 that CompuServe Classic would "no longer operate as an Internet Service Provider" and would close on June 30, 2009. All CompuServe Classic services, including OurWorld Web pages, were taken offline as of that date. CompuServe Classic e-mail users would be able to continue using their CompuServe e-mail addresses via a new e-mail system. The newer version of CompuServe, known as CompuServe Dialer for Windows, remains unaffected and AOL has said that it will continue to operate. However, with the discontinuation of Apple, Inc.'s PowerPC support in any setting, coupled with CompusServe 2000 for Mac OS X only being supported up until the last PowerPC release, version 10.5 (Leopard) and all other operating systems in which CompuServe supported on are no longer supported, CompuServe 2000 no longer works in any form on any computer (including Windows and Macintosh computers) thus leaving the CompuServe Dialer for Windows as the lone remaining version available still functioning properly on its web site. This prompted the removal of all CompuServe versions (at the time) from its website except for the Mac OS X (although no longer working in any form) and Dialer for Windows XP and Vista.

CompuServe announced in November 2017 that the CompuServe Forums would be shut down on December 15, 2017. The forums were removed from the CompuServe service on that date at 12:00 Eastern Standard Time, ending over 36 years of uninterrupted service on the CompuServe Forums that began in 1981 with the opening of the Aviation Special Interest Group (AVSIG) as CompuServe's first forum. Immediately following the discontinuance, most of the active CompuServe Forums moved to Forumania, which was explicitly established for the purpose of providing a new home for the CompuServe Forums. A small number of other forums found a new home elsewhere.

2010s versions

• CompuServe dialer for Windows XP and Vista (with compatibility going back to Windows 98)
• CompuServe 2000 for Mac OS X (up to 10.5; no longer works on any computer or OS but still mentioned on its website)

See also

• FILe Generator and Editor
• VIDTEX

References

External links

• Official website
• Aviation Special Interest Group
• CompuServe Interactive Services, Inc. History
• Interview with CompuServe Founder Jeff Wilkins

Source of article : Wikipedia

Bill Frist

src: media.bizj.us

William Harrison Frist Sr. (born February 22, 1952) is an American physician, businessman, and politician. He began his career as a heart and lung transplant surgeon. He later served two terms as a Republican United States Senator representing Tennessee. He was the Senate Majority Leader from 2003 to 2007.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Frist studied health care policy at Princeton University and interned for Congressman Joe L. Evins. Rather than going directly into politics, Frist earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School, becoming a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and several other hospitals. In 1994, he defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Jim Sasser, and pledged to only serve two terms.

After serving as Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Frist succeeded Tom Daschle as the Senate Majority Leader. Frist helped pass several parts of President George W. Bush's domestic agenda, including the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 and PEPFAR. He was also a strong proponent of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and a prominent advocate of tort reform. Frist left the Senate in 2007, honoring his commitment to serve no more than two terms. Since leaving Congress, he has remained active in public life and has taught at several universities.

Video Bill Frist

Childhood and medical career

Frist was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of Dorothy (née Cate) Frist and Thomas Fearn Frist, Sr. He is a fourth-generation Tennessean. His great-great grandfather was one of the founders of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his father was a doctor and founded the health care business organization which became Hospital Corporation of America. Frist's brother, Thomas F. Frist, Jr., became chairman and chief executive of Hospital Corporation of America in 1997.

Frist graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, and then from Princeton University in 1974, where he specialized in health care policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 1972, he held a summer internship with Tennessee Congressman Joe L. Evins, who advised Frist that if he wanted to pursue a political career, he should first have a career outside politics. Frist proceeded to Harvard Medical School, where he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine with honors in 1978. While at Harvard he shared an apartment with future United States Congressman David Wu.

Frist joined the lab of W. John Powell Jr. at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1977, where he continued his training in cardiovascular physiology. He left the lab in 1978 to become a resident in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1983, he spent time at Southampton General Hospital, Southampton, England as senior registrar in cardiothoracic surgery. He returned to Massachusetts General in 1984 as chief resident and fellow in cardiothoracic surgery. From 1985 until 1986, Frist was senior fellow and chief resident in cardiac transplant service and cardiothoracic surgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

After completing his fellowship, he became a faculty member at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he began a heart and lung transplantation program. He became staff surgeon at the Nashville Veterans Administration Hospital. In 1989, he founded the Vanderbilt Transplant Center. In 1991, Frist operated on then-Lieutenant Colonel David Petraeus after he had been shot in a training accident at Fort Campbell.

He is currently licensed as a physician, and is board certified in both general surgery and thoracic surgery. He has performed over 150 heart transplants and lung transplants, including pediatric heart transplants and combined heart and lung transplants.

Maps Bill Frist

Entering politics

In 1990, Frist met with former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker about the possibilities of public office. Baker advised him to pursue the Senate, and in 1992 suggested that Frist begin preparations to run in 1994. Frist began to build support. He served on Tennessee's Governor's Medicaid Task Force from 1992 to 1993, joined the National Steering Committee of the Republican National Committee's Health Care Coalition, and was deputy director of the Tennessee Bush-Quayle 1992 campaign.

During the 1994 election, Frist promised not to serve for more than two terms, a promise he honored.

He accused his opponent, incumbent Senator Jim Sasser, of "sending Tennessee money to Washington, DC", and said, "While I've been transplanting lungs and hearts to heal Tennesseans, Jim Sasser has been transplanting Tennesseans' wallets to Washington, home of Marion Barry." During the campaign he also criticized Sasser for trying to become Senate Majority Leader, claiming that his opponent would be spending more time taking care of Senate business than Tennessee business. Frist won the election, defeating Sasser by 13 points in the 1994 Republican sweep of both Houses of Congress, thus becoming the first physician in the Senate since June 17, 1938, when Royal S. Copeland died.

In his 2000 reelection campaign, Frist easily won with 66 percent of the vote. He received the largest vote total ever by a statewide candidate. Frist's 2000 campaign organization was later fined by the Federal Election Commission for failing to disclose a $1.44 million loan taken out jointly with the 1994 campaign organization.

src: www.deseretnews.com

National attention

Frist first entered the national spotlight when two Capitol police officers were shot inside the United States Capitol by Russell Eugene Weston Jr. in 1998. Frist, the closest doctor, provided immediate medical attention (he was unable to save the two officers, but was able to save Weston). He also was the Congressional spokesman during the 2001 anthrax attacks.

As the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he helped Republicans win back the Senate in the 2002 midterm election. His committee collected $66.4 million for 2001-2002, 50% more than the previous year. Shortly afterwards, Senator Trent Lott made comments at a Strom Thurmond birthday celebration in which he said that if Thurmond's presidential bid of 1948 had succeeded, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years".

In the aftermath, Lott resigned his position as Senate Majority Leader and Frist was chosen unanimously by Senate Republicans as his replacement. He became the third youngest Senate Majority Leader in US history. In his 2005 book, Herding Cats, A Lifetime in Politics, Lott accuses Frist of being "one of the main manipulators" in the debate that ended Lott's leadership in the Republican Senate. Lott wrote that Frist's actions amounted to a "personal betrayal". Frist "... didn't even have the courtesy to call and tell me personally that he was going to run ... If Frist had not announced exactly when he did, as the fire was about to burn out, I would still be majority leader of the Senate today," Lott wrote.

In the 2003 legislative session, Frist enjoyed many successes. He was able to push many initiatives through to fruition, including the Bush administration's third major tax cut and legislation that was against partial-birth abortion. However, the tactics that he used to achieve those victories alienated many Democrats. He also was instrumental in developing and then passing the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the historic and unprecedented funding commitment to fight disease. In 2004, by comparison, he saw no major legislative successes, with the explanations ranging from delay tactics by Democrats to lack of unity within the Republican Party.

In a prominent and nationally broadcast speech to the Republican National Convention in August 2004, Frist highlighted his background as a doctor and focused on several issues related to health care. He spoke in favor of the recently passed Medicare prescription drug benefit and the passage of legislation providing for Health Savings Accounts. He described President Bush's policy regarding stem cell research, limiting embryonic stems cells to certain existing lines, as "ethical".

In an impassioned argument for medical malpractice tort reform, Frist called personal injury trial lawyers "predators": "We must stop them from twisting American medicine into a litigation lottery where they hit the jackpot and every patient ends up paying." Frist has been an advocate for imposing caps on the amount of money courts can award plaintiffs for noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases.

During the 2004 election season, Frist employed the unprecedented political tactic of going to the home state of the opposition party's minority leader, Democrat Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and actively campaigning against him. Daschle's Republican opponent, John Thune, defeated Daschle. In Daschle's farewell address, Frist arrived late. The two men have since found common ground and work together at the Bipartisan Policy Center and often speak together for healthcare conventions and events. After the 2004 elections, amid the controversy over Arlen Specter's post-election remarks, Frist demanded a public statement from Specter to repudiate his earlier remarks and pledge support for Bush's judiciary nominees. Frist rejected an early version of the statement as too weak, and gave his approval to the statement that Specter eventually delivered.

Many of Frist's opponents have attacked him for what they see as pandering to future Republican primary voters. They claim he has taken extreme positions on social issues such as the Terri Schiavo case to please them. However, Frist changed his position on stem cell research. Frist received enormous praise from former First Lady Nancy Reagan for supporting expanded federal financing for stem cell research.

There has also been controversy regarding the "nuclear option", under which the Republicans would change a rule in the Senate to prevent the filibuster of judicial nominations. Although Frist claimed that "[n]ever before has a minority blocked a judicial nominee that has majority support for an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor", critics pointed to the nearly two-century history of the filibuster, including the successful four-day 1968 minority Republican filibuster of Lyndon Baines Johnson's chief justice nominee, Abe Fortas.

In 1998, Frist participated in the Republican filibuster to stall the nomination of openly gay James C. Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg; Hormel eventually received a recess appointment from President Bill Clinton, bypassing a Senate vote. Frist also helped block the 1996 nomination of Richard Paez to the 9th Federal Court of Appeals, a four-year filibuster that was defeated in 2000 when 14 Republicans dropped their support for it and allowed Paez to be confirmed by a simple majority.

More criticism of perceived weakness came in the midst of an extended confirmation fight over Bush's pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton. Twice Frist failed to garner the 60 votes to break cloture, getting fewer votes the second time and even losing the support of one moderate Republican (George Voinovich of Ohio). On June 21, 2005, Frist said the situation had been "exhausted" and there would be no more votes. Only an hour later, after speaking to the White House, Frist said: "The president made it very clear he wants an up-or-down vote." This sudden switch in strategy led to charges of flip-flopping in response to pressure from the Bush administration. Nevertheless, no up-and-down vote was held, and Bush made a recess appointment of Bolton.

In September 2006, working with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, Frist was a major Senate supporter of H.R. 4411 -- the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. Frist's bill called for restrictions on banking transactions for online gambling, while Frist has received contributions from land-based casinos. The bill, which passed without debate as part of the SAFE Port Act, also allowed horse racing and lotteries to remain legal.

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Political future

Frist pledged to leave the Senate after two terms in 2006, and did not run in the 2006 Republican primary for his Senate seat. He campaigned heavily for Republican candidate Bob Corker, who won by a small margin over Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. in the general election.

Frist was seen as a potential presidential candidate for the Republican party in 2008, like Bob Dole, a previous holder of the Senate Majority Leader position. On November 28, 2006, however, he announced that he had decided not to run, and would return to the field of medicine.

Frist's name was mentioned as a possible candidate for Governor of Tennessee in 2010 when incumbent Governor Phil Bredesen was barred from running again due to term limits. Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Bob Davis has said that "he'd have a lot of support" if he chose to run. Frist announced that he had decided not to seek that office in January 2009.

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ONE campaign

After leaving the U.S. Senate, he became a Co-Chair of ONE VOTE '08, an initiative of the ONE campaign, with Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). According to onevote.org, "ONE Vote '08 is an unprecedented, non-partisan campaign to make global health and extreme poverty foreign policy priorities in the 2008 presidential election." He traveled to Africa in support of various initiatives for the ONE campaign in July 2008 and an extensive blog about his trip exists, complete with videos here.

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Education reform

In 2009, Frist launched a statewide education reform nonprofit organization targeting K-12 education called SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education). The organization's mission is to "collaboratively support Tennessee's work to prepare students for college and the workforce." Frist serves as the Chairman of SCORE's Board of Directors.

As part of SCORE's work, Frist presents the State of Education in Tennessee report at the beginning of each year, a comprehensive look at the state's efforts to improve public education. SCORE also awards the SCORE Prize on an annual basis, which is given annually to the elementary, middle, and high school in Tennessee, along with one school district, that have most dramatically improved student achievement.

Frist has voiced support for higher academic standards in grades K-12, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and improving efforts to identify, foster, and reward effective teaching.

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Global Health and Hope Through Healing Hands

In addition to Senator Frist's decades of medical mission work and commitments to other global health organizations, his main thrust in global health is via his Nashville-based Hope Through Healing Hands (HTHH), a nonprofit 501(c) 3 whose mission is to promote improved quality of life for citizens and communities around the world using health as a currency for peace. Jenny Eaton Dyer, Ph.D. has served as CEO/Executive Director since 2008.

Under the umbrella of health diplomacy, HTHH includes efforts for child survival/maternal health, clean water, extreme poverty, and global disease such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and Malaria. Strategically, HTHH promotes global partnership by working hand-in-hand with leading organizations that best address these issues in developing nations.

Since 2004 HTHH has invested more than $3.5 million in charities in both the United States and abroad. These investments have been in support of infrastructure, sustainable health development, education, healthcare, and emergency relief.

HTHH's flagship program is the Frist Global Health Leaders program. This program sponsors young health professionals as students and residents to travel to underserved areas to promote peace through health in communities and clinical settings. These students spend between one-three month(s) focusing on service to those in need, alongside the work of training community health workers.

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Other professional and charitable activities

In June 1989, Frist published his first book, Transplant: A Heart Surgeon's Account of the Life-And-Death Dramas of the New Medicine, in which he wrote, "A doctor is a man whose job justifies everything . . . Life [is] a gift, not an inalienable right."

With J. H. Helderman, he edited "Grand Rounds in Transplantation" in 1995. In October 1999, Frist co-authored Tennessee Senators, 1911-2001: Portraits of Leadership in a Century of Change with J. Lee Annis, Jr. In March 2002, Frist published his third book, When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor. While generally well received, the book later spurred accusations of hypocrisy regarding his remarks about Richard Clarke. When Clarke published his book Against All Enemies in 2004, Frist stated "I am troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their service as a government insider with access to our nation's most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001." In December 2003, Frist and co-author Shirley Wilson released the self-promoting book, Good People Beget Good People: A Genealogy of the Frist Family.

In 1998 Frist visited African hospitals and schools with the Christian aid group Samaritan's Purse. Frist has continued to make medical mission trips to Africa every year since 1998. He has also been vocal in speaking out against the genocide occurring in Darfur.

During 2007-2008, Frist was the Frederick H. Schultz Professor of International Economic Policy in Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

In 2008, he became a partner in Chicago-based Cressey & Co. investing in the nation's health care market. In 2009, Frist began teaching at Vanderbilt's Owen School of Management and at the Medical School where he taught before his 1994 election, while becoming a chairman of the Nashville-based nonprofit organization Hope Through Healing Hands that centers on health and education around the world. He is currently adjunct professor of Surgery in the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Vanderbilt and clinical professor of Surgery at Meharry Medical College.

In May 2009, Frist joined forensic chemical and drug-testing laboratory Aegis Sciences Corp. as a health care advisor and member of its board of directors. His new responsibilities include assisting in Aegis's development of a strategic alliance with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, providing counsel on the company's research and development for new laboratory-based toxicology assessments, and advise Aegis on general health care issues.

In November 2009, Frist joined the board of directors of engineering, construction and technical services firm URS Corp. to bring his expertise and unique perspective on a wide range of economic issues.

In March 2010, Frist was appointed a member of the six-person board of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which had raised $66 million to date for immediate earthquake relief and long-term recovery efforts in the Caribbean country. Frist had also traveled to Haiti with Samaritan's Purse in January 2010 and with the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund in June 2012.

Frist also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, where he is a co-leader of the Health Project

In July 2012, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced that Frist had been elected to its Board of Trustees, effective in January 2013. RWJF is the largest health-oriented foundation in the United States. His other board service includes First Lady Michelle Obama's "Partnership for a Healthier America" campaign to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, and the Advisory Committees for Global Health at Duke and Harvard. He is also on the advisory board for technologically innovative healthcare companies ZocDoc and aTherapy.

Frist also leads medical mission trips to recent disaster sites around the globe, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Frist is on the Board of Selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.

Frist is a founding circle member of The Nantucket Project, an annual conference that takes place on Nantucket, Massachusetts.

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Personal life

Bill Frist is the son of Thomas F. Frist, Sr. and Dorothy Cate. He has four siblings: businessman and philanthropist Thomas F. Frist, Jr.; Dr. Robert A. Frist; Dorothy F. Boensch; and Mary F. Barfield.

In 1982, Frist married Karyn McLaughlin. Frist recounted in his 2009 memoir meeting his future wife in 1979 when he attended to at a clinic in Boston. He was engaged to another woman in Tennessee and broke it off a week before the wedding. They have three sons: Harrison, Jonathan, and Bryan. The Frist family were members of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.. Karyn Frist reportedly filed for divorce on September 7, 2012.

On May 29, 2015, Frist married Tracy Lynne Roberts (b. April 14, 1962). The couple resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Frist has been a pilot since the age of 16. He holds commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings. He has also run seven marathons and two half-marathons.

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Financial status

Frist has a fortune in the millions of dollars, most of it the result of his ownership of stock in Hospital Corporation of America, the for-profit hospital chain founded by his brother and father. Frist's 2005 financial disclosure form lists blind trusts valued between $15 million and $45 million.

Members of the Frist family have been major donors to Princeton University, pledging a reported $25 million in 1997 for the construction of the Frist Campus Center. Frist has said that, a few years after his 1974 graduation from Princeton, "I made a commitment to myself that if I was ever in a position to help pull together the resources to establish a center [on the Princeton campus] where there could be an informal exchange of ideas, and to establish an environment that is conducive to the casual exchange of information, I would do so." Daniel Golden, a Wall Street Journal journalist and author of the book The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, has suggested that two of Frist's sons (Harrison and Bryan) were admitted to Princeton as recognition of this donation rather than their own academic and extracurricular merit.

Bill and Karyn Frist are the sole trustees in charge of a family foundation bearing the senator's name, which had more than $2 million in assets in 2004. He and his siblings are vice presidents of another charitable foundation bearing their parents' names. Frist failed to list his positions with the two foundations on his Senate disclosure form. In July 2006, when the matter was raised by the Associated Press, his staff said the form would be amended. Frist has previously disclosed his board position with World of Hope, a charity that gives money to causes associated with AIDS. The charity has come under scrutiny for paying consulting fees to members of Frist's political inner circle.

The status of Frist's blind trust, and subsequent statements about it and activities within it led to an SEC Investigations of the trustees June 13, 2005 sale. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York issued subpoenas to investigate the sale, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began an insider trading investigation of the sale. After an 18-month investigation, the SEC closed its probe without pressing charges. Frist said in a statement, "I've always conducted myself according to the highest ethical standards in both my personal and public life, and my family and I are pleased that this matter has been resolved."

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Controversies

Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA)

Just before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections, in what politicos call a "midnight drop", Frist inserted the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) clauses into the larger, unrelated Security and Accountability for Every Port (SAFE) Act. The SAFE Act itself was a late "must pass" bill designed to safeguard ports from terrorist infiltration. In the Zogby International Poll, 87% believe online gambling is a personal choice which should not be banned. A Wall Street Journal Poll showed 85% oppose government prohibition of online gambling. The UIGEA became the basis for the April 15, 2011, US Department of Justice government crackdown and domain name seizure of three of the worlds top online poker sites, dubbed "black Friday" in the poker community. The DOJ Office of Legal Counsel subsequently issued an opinion in September 2011, stating that the UIGEA applies only to betting on sporting events and contests and not to other types of online gambling.

Campaign finance law violation

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that Frist's 2000 Senate campaign committee, Frist 2000, Inc., violated federal campaign finance laws. "In June 2000, Senator Frist took $1 million of the money that had been contributed to his 2000 Senate campaign and invested it in the stock market, where it promptly began losing money. In November 2000, Senator Frist sought to collect $1.2 million he had lent his 1994 Senate campaign committee. As a result of the stock market losses, however, Frist 2000, Inc. did not have enough money to repay the loan. Senator Frist solved this problem by having the 1994 and the 2000 campaign committees jointly take out a $1.44 million bank loan at a cost of $10,000 a month interest. Frist 2000, Inc. did not report this debt on its FEC disclosure forms." Frist paid a civil fine of $11,000 in a settlement with the FEC.

Investigation into stock sales

Frist was questioned in 2005 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about stock sales allegedly based on inside information. The investigation closed after 18 months and no charges were filed.

Schiavo case

In the Terri Schiavo case, a brain-damaged woman whose husband wanted to remove her gastric feeding tube, Frist opposed the removal and in a speech delivered on the Senate Floor, challenged the diagnosis of Schiavo's physicians of Schiavo being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS): "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office". Frist was criticized by a medical ethicist at Northwestern University for making a diagnosis without personally examining the patient and for questioning the diagnosis when he was not a neurologist. After her death, the autopsy showed signs of long-term and irreversible damage to a brain consistent with PVS. Frist defended his actions after the autopsy.

Medical school experiments

While he was a medical school student in the 1970s, Frist performed fatal medical experiments and vivisection on shelter cats while researching the use of drugs on the mitral valve. By his own account, Frist improperly obtained these cats from Boston animal shelters, falsely telling shelter staff he was adopting the cats as pets. In his book, Frist asserted that he succumbed to the pressure to succeed in a highly competitive medical school.

Frist's treatment of cats first became controversial in 1994, in his first Senate campaign, when the opposing camp in the Republican primary called him a cat-killer. The matter again created public controversy in 2002, after mention in a Boston Globe profile, published after his election as Senate majority leader.

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Ideology and issues

Frist's primary legislative focus has been on issues of concern to the health care industry and on pro-life issues. He also opposes abortion and all federal funding of abortion. In the Senate, he led the fight against partial birth abortion, voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and against an amendment to include a woman's health exception (saying that he considered the procedure to be hazardous to a woman's health). He supports the death penalty.

Frist supported a total ban on human cloning, including for embryonic stem cell research. Since 2001, Frist had stood beside Bush in his insistence that only currently existing lines be used for stem cell research. But in July 2005, after severely criticizing the MLO, Frist reversed course and endorsed a House-passed plan to expand federal funding of the research, saying "it's not just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science." Up to that point the legislation had been considered bottled up in the Senate. The decision quickly drew criticism from some Christian groups such as James Dobson, but garnered praise from some Democrats and many Republicans, including former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

Frist supports programs to fight AIDS and African poverty. He travels to Africa frequently to provide medical care.

On education, Frist supports the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed in 2001 with bipartisan support. In August 2005, he announced his support for teaching intelligent design in public school science classes.

He opposes same-sex marriage and adoption by homosexual couples.

In November 2005, Frist told reporters that he was less concerned about possible torture at CIA secret prisons than he was about potentially compromising the security of millions of Americans. Flying home after visiting the Guantanamo Bay detention center he said September 10, 2006 he expects bipartisan support for putting top captured al-Qaeda figures on trial before military commissions and for guidelines on how they should be treated. Frist visited the detention center in eastern Cuba, which holds some 460 detainees, including 14 top alleged al-Qaida figures recently transferred from CIA custody. He stated that his visit with fellow Republicans Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, was especially poignant coming one day short of the fifth anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Frist said that visiting the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, and recognizing that the 14 individuals who likely contributed to the September 11, 2001 attacks were there, led him to realize how critical it is that the U.S. define the appropriate criteria to make sure that the government have the information to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again. The senators didn't see the 14 new detainees, but visited Guantanamo to learn of the interrogation techniques. In his mind, the detainees are being treated in a safe and humane way.

After leaving the Senate, during the health care reform debates, Frist stated that he would have broken with his party and would have voted in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was unanimously voted against by Republicans. In January 2011, after the Republicans regained a majority in the House, Frist called on them not to attempt to repeal the health care law.

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Electoral history

References

External links

• Mark Byrnes: William H. Frist. In: The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, December 25, 2009, last updated February 22, 2011
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Hope Through Healing Hands
• SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education)

Source of article : Wikipedia