[killjoywashere]

Trackballs date back to the 60s, at least. The original design advantage of a trackball was pursuit and target acquisition. They were developed for military radar operators to quickly move the focus to an inbound bogie, potentially supersonic. If they could acquire and track the target on air search radar, they could mark it twice on two consecutive sweeps of the air search radar, giving the fire control system a course and speed so the fire control radar had a better shot of getting a lock.

My first four years out of college I spent a lot of time in that space, so I got quite comfortable with trackballs. Now I use them exclusively on my desktop. My only complaint is they aren't embedded flush in the desktop :)