UNITED STATES v. KORPAN, 354 U.S. 271 (1957) finally designated them as "games of chance" with the attendant federal tax on them and that got rid of most of the machines in bars outside Nevada.
In fact, I got addicted to them in Mississippi where I was working one summer during college. Spent 3 months trying to map oil fields by drilling holes in the ground, detonating explosives, and feeding the echos from dozens of seismometers to kludgy electronics in an old truck. As I recall we used monster floppy disks about 2 feet in diameter. There were no portable computers in the 50's. (No riverboat gambling either)
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