my next door neighbor had one of these bad boys circa 2005, and i HATED it, but he had Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and Sim City 2000 and I did not, so we had no choice
Even in high school I knew I was going into the digital art space in some way for my Major in undergrad and so we saved up multiple birthday's to get the big iMac G4. You know the one with the half orb base and the goose neck supporting a huge monitor that you could position. It came with the one on the left, just a huge clear button on the top to click, no right click left click or anything. The side buttons did something and I don't even remember what because you never used them, they were so awkward.
I eventually wanted a scroll wheel so I upgrade to the one on the right. I hated this thing so much. Just ever month or so getting out an index card and rubbing that fucking ball all over it until it finally worked again. Just gross gray trails all over your index card. Even beyond the little ball, it broke more often than it should. I think I had three of these over the years.
I eventually got a Wacom Intuos3 tablet for my digital art. I just had it plugged into my iMac G4 at my computer desk in my room and it took up the entire keyboard drawer, so I kept my keyboard up on the desk basically under the hanging screen. It included a mouse that I used for a while but eventually I just used the tablet for everything, even basic navigation. Just holding a pen in my hand clicking on links on the shoujo-ai forums or whatever.
My undergrad as a program where they gave all the art students MacBooks. So I left my iMac at home but brought this tablet and would plug it into my laptop constantly and still use it as a mouse. Immensely impractical to just roll up to a table in the campus coffee shop and pull this out of your backpack to plug into your laptop so you could search the internet. I preferred it so much to a trackpad.
(This isn't my photo but you get the idea.)
I still have this thing tucked away in a closet somewhere and I bust it out whenever I want to play a 4X game because I still prefer it for navigating those spaces and love setting up hotkeys on the sides for commonly used buttons in the game.
