Oups, I misremembered: the game is called Core War. In it, MARS (“Memory Array Redcode Simulator”) is the name of a virtual machine that executes Redcode instructions. As a player, you write small programs (“warriors”) to be loaded on the virtual machine where they try to prevail while klling off (overwriting) opponent programs.
Thanks for the excerpt.
Really? Framing it “so-called” makes it sound esoteric and rare, while in fact it’s an utterly common machine tool used in many industries to create … pretty much anything (eg. casting dies for Lego bricks). I wish they’d tone down the alarmism (unless they know it’s ordered by “Ivan’s Shell Mfg. Co”).