MARS (ticket reservation system)

The host computer for MARS was originally located in Kokubunji, Tokyo, until 2013, when it was relocated to an undisclosed site in the northern Kantō region. Management of the system has been handled by JR Systems since 1 April 1987, following the division and privatization of JNR. In the JR Central region, these offices are instead referred to as . ==History==

MARS-1 The MARS-1 system was created by Mamoru Hosaka, Yutaka Ohno, and others at the Japanese National Railways' R&D Institute (now the Railway Technical Research Institute), and was built in 1958. It was the world's first seat reservation system for trains, and entered service in February 1960, initially only providing bookings for the Kodama and Tsubame limited express services. 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. MARS 100/200 MARS 300 MARS 500 MARS 501 Introduced in stages between 2002 and 2004, the MARS 501 introduced the concept of an Ethernet-based client–server model. Also, the ticket paper type was changed to thermal paper. MARS 505 The latest version of MARS uses the MARS 505 system which was introduced in April 2020, which expanded on contactless, and ticketless boarding and booking capabilities brought along by the rise of mobile apps on smartphones and tablets. ==References==