Welcome back to Input Origins - your monthly time machine through the evolution of control! And this time, we're rolling into the story of the trackball. Ever wondered what came before the mouse?
1960s - A track ball being used to move the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking station antenna
The Trackball.
The first implementation of the point-and-click paradigm, born in a naval engineering lab in the late 1940s, perfected in arcade halls of the 1980s, and still spinning strong in control rooms today. It's the cult classic that invented cursor control, then lost the war to its own descendant, the mouse.
Let's get the ball rolling.
1952 - The Royal Canadian Navy's Trackball was made with a real bowling ball. (Computer History Museum).
A Military secret from 1946
It's the post WWII era. Military engineers are scrambling to figure out how to track targets on their primitive radar screens without losing their heads using clunky joysticks. In 1946, British engineer Ralph Benjamin has his "eureka" moment and builds the Roller Ball, a metal sphere rolling on rubber wheels to elegantly slide a cursor over target aircraft. Enter the world's first trackball!
Ralph effectively implemented the point-and-click paradigm for computing, for the first time ever! A silent achievement, the military kept it hush-hush. But when a need arises, it's only a matter of time until someone figures it out. In 1952, Canadian naval engineers independently invented another trackball to control their own radar system, and a fun fact, they used a standard five-pin bowling ball as the roller. Same need, ;same elegant solution, achieved independently! A classic case of multiple discovery!
1981 - The Wico Command Control - the first ever standalone trackball unit.
It Escaped the Lab
By the 1960s, the trackball had escaped the secrecy of the navy. It started appearing in ATC centers and military command consoles worldwide. But it wasn't staying underground forever. It found its way out of full-metal ships and classified bunkers, straight into the neon-glow of the good old 80's arcades.
Enter: the 1978 Atari Football, the (kinda) first-ever entertainment use of a trackball. Picture a cocktail-table arcade game with a trackball at each end. Two players. Two teams. One vertical field. Each player spun their trackball to run, block, and execute simple plays in a fast, head-to-head game of American football. This game popularized the trackball. It sparked a wave of trackball arcades and home devices, with the Wico Command Control (c. 1981) becoming the first-ever standalone trackball unit you could actually buy at a store. The trackball had officially gone mainstream.
1986 - Fun fact: The "Kensington Turbo Mouse" was a trackball. Apparently "Turbo Trackball" didn't sound cool enough
The First Space Email Was Sent Using a Trackball?
The trackball's true ascent came in the form of a serious productivity tool. This began in 1986 with the iconic Kensington Turbo Mouse for the Macintosh, captivating graphic designers by offering pixel-perfect precision without requiring the desk space of a mouse. By 1989, the trackball became the standard for mobility, appearing as a built-in feature on the Apple Macintosh Portable, which was used to send the first-ever email from space! (although full confirmation for that is still pending).
Logitech revolutionized the form factor that same year with the iconic TrackMan, cementing the trackball's place in computing history. All in all, nowadays the trackball is mainly used by enthusiasts and CAD designers, having eventually lost the war to the mouse. And the plot twist: the one industry where the trackball never lost and remains the absolute standard today is Marine and Aviation Navigation. Where it all started!
1968 - The first mouse by Douglas Engelbart, at "The Mother of All Demos"
"Why Not Just Use a Mouse?"
When graphical interfaces arrived, they created a fundamental challenge: how do you let users point anywhere on a screen and click to interact? The trackball solved it first. Roll the ball to move the cursor and click! But Engelbart's mouse won the war. Why?
It was cheaper to manufacture at scale. More intuitive for new users. Quickly standardized by tech companies. More precise with optical sensors. And more comfortable for long sessions. Two implementations of the same paradigm. Both brilliant. One became ubiquitous, the other became niche. Which raises the question: Are there entirely new control paradigms still waiting to be implemented?
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The Spatial Paradigm Challenge
Here's the thing: we're entering a new era. Spatial computing and mixed reality are emerging. and they need a new control paradigm. When the interface is around us, in our glasses, on multiple screens as we walk, when we need to manipulate artifacts in 3D space, the best solution is our hands. Gesture tracking. Cameras and computer vision is one great implementation. Computer vision models have been perfected over many many years now, tracking hand movements with impressive accuracy.
But what if we could pick up the neural signals that trigger hand movements? What if we could decipher them before your hand even moves? Neural input, an emerging technology, suggests a new way to implement hand gestures, enabling subtle micro-gestures and full hand mapping without cameras, without line-of-sight, without occlusion.
Well, no need to hypothesize anymore! Try Neural Input for yourself at our CES booth this January!
Visit us at LVCC, Central Hall — 15650
