The Nation: Electronic Nags

New York City’s Off-Track Betting Corp., which in the four months of its operation has collected about $30 million in what used to be the wages of sin, is considering a device, developed by Video Information Systems Inc., that would presumably allow bettors to tune in the race at home and punch their bets by electronic code on the buttons of the converter.

Some sentimentalists, nursing a murky prevision of man as a fat smudge in a chair hovering before a cyclopean TV, with only his massive eyes and a few fingers intact for fixing the vertical hold or clutching a beer, will recall that the point of racing, after all, was once to stand in a crowd to watch actual horses running around the actual track or putting down actual cash at an actual betting window.