The American Gaming Association has estimated that there are currently well over 2,000 web sites on the Internet devoted to online gambling. They offer a full variety of wagering options, from sports betting and casino games to poker, lotteries and bingo.
Another report has put annual online gambling revenues at $26.9 billion as of 2008. That is roughly four times the gross revenues of the entire Las Vegas Strip during the same year. Clearly, online gambling has come of age—a phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing down as it delivers the thrill of playing and winning directly to computer users worldwide.
Setting the Stage
Although the explosion of online gambling may seem rather recent, it has in fact been building up to this crescendo for about 100 years. Current gaming sites can quite literally trace their roots all the way back to the poolrooms of the late 19th century.
In those days, “runners” stationed at various race tracks would monitor horses, jockeys, turf conditions, and the weather. Before post time, they would dash to the nearest telegraph office and send their findings to a central clearing house. From there, the information was passed on via the “race wire” to pool halls far and wide, where off-track odds were set and bettors could place wagers when the numbers seemed right.
By the 1920s, Western Union and the poolrooms still controlled the race wires, but newer inventions—the telephone and broadcast radio—eroded their monopoly over remote gambling. In the 1930s, true race and sports books emerged, as live radio broadcasts of football match-ups and horse races were initiated. Then came television in the 1940s. Suddenly, it was possible to watch and bet on events taking place hundreds of miles away.
In1947, the world’s first operational electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was patented. Half a dozen years later, International Business Machines (IBM) began shipping its first 700 series computers.
True personal computers would not be available until the introduction of the Alto in 1973, followed by the more affordable Apple II and Tandy’s TRS-80 in 1976. But by then a network linking the mainframe computers of academic communities and governments would already be well established. ARPAnet (1967) soon led to the invention of e-mail (1971), Ethernet (1973) and Telenet (1973), the precursor of today’s Internet.
As personal computers quickly proliferated, less scrupulous innovations also began to appear. These included the appearance of SPAM (1978), hacking (1986), and the original PC virus, “Brain” (1986). The term “cyberspace” was coined in 1984, followed by the “World Wide Web” in 1989. Mosaic, the first user-friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) or “browser” became available in 1992.
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