Old-time slot machines

[mrbowling300]

Does anyone know how the old time slot machines worked? I'm talking about those in the 1950s and prior

Was there any primitive type of randomizer in the wheels?

Or did the wheels just randomly stop spinning and where ever they fell, they fell?

How did they prevent any kind of cheating or repeat winning?

The ones that looked like this:

 

[Almost Allright]

Probably the biggest theft/cheating prevention in that era was coming home with all your digits intact

 

[WildBill]

They were based on simple math, no randomizers in them. The odds were just terrible, think like 30-40% payout which was enough to make few want to play them regularly compared to today's machines with their over 90% payouts. Random number generators in slots didn't become a thing until the late 80s when IGT and Bally started using them, but they were still based on the math of the reels. Then IGT took it to another level with their randomizer which made million dollar jackpots possible because it brought in a two-step process which made the odds on games infinitely higher and made the reels become basically illustrations of the results.