1. (noun)Mars, Red Planet a small reddish planet that is the 4th from the sun and is periodically visible to the naked eye; minerals rich in iron cover its surface and are responsible for its characteristic color "Mars has two satellites"
2. (noun)Mars (Roman mythology) Roman god of war and agriculture; father of Romulus and Remus; counterpart of Greek Ares
2. (noun)MARS one of the planets of the solar system, the fourth in order from the sun, or the next beyond the earth, having a diameter of about 4,200 miles, a period of 687 days, and a meandistance of 141,000,000 miles. It is conspicuous for the redness of its light
1. MARS the exteriorplanet of the Solar system, nearest the earth, of one-half its diameter, with a meandistance from the sun of 141,000,000 m., round which it takes 686 days to revolve, in a somewhat centric orbit, and 24½ hours to revolve on its own axis, which inclines to its equator at an angle of 29°; examination of it shows that there is four times as muchland as water in it; it is accompanied by two moons, an outer making a revolutionround it in 30 hours 18 minutes, and an inner in 7 hours and 38 minutes; they are the smallest heavenly bodies known to science.
1. MARS A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal HackerDream Gone Wrong.
Mars was the codename for a family of PDP-10-compatible computers built by
Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small
uniprocessor SC-25, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40. These
machines were marvels of engineering design; although not much slower than
the unique Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller
and consumed less power than the much slower DEC
KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely
compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the
operating system) with no modifications at about 2--3times faster than a
KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiterproject in 1983 (their followup to the
PDP-10), Systems Concepts should have made a bundleselling their machine
into shops with a lot of softwareinvestment in PDP-10s, and in fact their
spring 1984 announcement generated a greatdeal of excitement in the PDP-10
world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20
by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were
muchbetter at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them;
the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism
into continually improving the design, and lostcredibility as delivery
dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously;
they believed they were competing with the KL10 and
VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun
Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power
comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped
the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made
the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix
boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by
CompuServe.
Definitions of MARS 
