The oldest online casino is difficult to pin down, but it’s generally accepted that the first ones were established around 1994. So, as you sit down and play some online slots or engage in a live feed poker game, one has to wonder how much technology has changed in the last twenty-five years. More importantly, just how much have these changes affected the online gambling industry?
To find out, let’s look at the very basic way in which it was played. How did you play an online casino game back in the mid-nineties? Chances are that you were playing on a desktop PC. Ah yes, the desktops of those times!
So, just how fast were those computers? Well, each new processor chip was a hundred times faster than the previous. So, the Pentium IV processor we have now is about a hundred million times faster than that processor from the long, long ago. How does this affect online gambling? To a phenomenal extent. It’s hard to believe, but none of the software or the games you play right now would ever work on one of those computers.
Next stop on this trip? Well, you might just see the City of Bandwidth coming up on your left. Way back in the nineties, few cable companies had the Internet available through their systems. What did everyone use back then? Old, traditional landlines. As a result, the speed at which information was transmitted over the Internet was unbelievably slow compared to today. You would have had a real time searching for anything, even a Rival casino list. As a result, the online casinos back then would have used very simple software that used very little bandwidth.
This is something that affects another bit of technology commonly used and is also used on online casinos, which is live feeds. This is something that we see every day. If you use Skype, you’ve seen a live feed. There are online casinos now that allow you to play live poker. Back in the nineties, this was absolutely impossible. The best you could have hoped for then was the equivalent of a live chat! So be happy to have those webcams!
Technology has also changed the convenience you have with online casinos now. Back then, companies had barely heard of the Internet, and many did not see the profitability of it. Yes, the net was a freer place back then, but it also had far fewer options. Today, you have a list of options on how you would like to pay and how you would like to be paid. Back then? Few and far between. Online Casinos would likely have had MasterCard and Visa, and that’s about it! There was no PayPal or Bitcoin. Sorry!
The other major change that’s affected online casinos over the last few decades is security. Were there viruses back in 1994? Yes, but they were far fewer, and they were generally harder to get. I knew many people back in the nineties who had computers, but I didn’t know any that had security on it! So, back then, if you did make some kind of transaction online, there was little to nothing protecting that information.
Today, this is an entirely different matter, of course. Online casinos have layers of security and advanced software to ensure that you have a safe experience playing games online, and your money isn’t interfered in any way. The same could not have been said twenty-five years ago.
An interesting change in how things have changed online casinos is the basics of how they look. Way back when, you had a very simple screen on a desktop to play online games. We are talking, by the way, about 600 X 800 resolution. So, how did it look? Pretty blocky!
Truthfully, it wasn’t that bad, but seeing the pixels was just part of life back then. Nothing looked truly round, and you just put up with it! Today, however with 1080 resolution, online casinos look like a million bucks compared to twenty-five years ago. And, let’s be honest, a lot of people wouldn’t have played back then because of the limitations of the graphics, not to mention bandwidth limits and the speed of their own computer!
This brings us to the most important technology to have changed online casinos over the last twenty-five years. It’s what makes them portable. That’s right, it’s smartphones, tablet, and laptops, oh my! It’s these devices that online casinos can be played on that have changed the industry the most.
Before, you had no choice but to gamble at home, in your otherwise seldom used office! Today, you can play anytime and anywhere! Not such a bad bit of convenience for us today.
And now you see just how much technology has changed online casinos.