Hassan II of Morocco because of Moroccan claims on the country (see Great Morocco). Economically, Hassan II adopted a market-based economy, where agriculture, tourism, and phosphates mining industries played a major role. The period from the 1960s to the late 1980s was labelled as the "years of lead" and saw thousands of dissidents jailed, killed, exiled or forcibly disappeared. King Hassan II had extended many parliamentary functions by the early 1990s and released hundreds of political prisoners in 1991, and allowed the Alternance, where the opposition assumed power, for the first time in the Arab World. He set up a Royal Council for Human
Ascend Communications Ascend Communications Ascend Communications was an Alameda, California-based manufacturer of communications equipment that was later purchased by Lucent Technologies in 1999. Ascend Communications was founded in 1988 and taken public in 1994. Initial investors included Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers (KPCB); Greylock Partners; and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Ascend Communications designed and manufactured equipment for high density dialup installations, most notably the "MAX TNT", which allowed for a DS3 of dialup lines to be terminated in a few rack units. Customers such as AOL, Earthlink, and UUnet purchased over two million dialup ports worth of "MAX TNT" access servers during