MARS (ticket reservation system)

MARS (マルス, Marusu), short for Magnetic-electronic Automatic Reservation System, is a train ticket reservation system used by the Japan Railways Group (JR Group) companies and travel agencies in Japan.

[2] Ticket offices at JR stations equipped with MARS terminals are called Midori-no-madoguchi (みどりの窓口, literally "green window"), selling tickets of all JR Group trains and partly highway buses and route buses and ferries.

[5][6] In the JR Central region, these are instead called by the name きっぷうりば kippu uriba, meaning "ticket sales counter".

[13] The MARS-1 was capable of reserving seat positions, and was controlled by a Hitachi mainframe transistor computer with a central processing unit consisting of a thousand transistors and a magnetic drum memory unit for data storage, which was where the MARS acronym originated from.

[12] In 2008, the MARS-1 system received a "One Step on Electro Technology -Look Back to the Future-" commemorative plaque from the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.