Following a few years after the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) in 1970, the discovery of charmed particles established the need for very high precision (few &mgr;m) detectors for tracking high energy charged particles. This review describes the work which has evolved over the past 20 years from these disconnected events, both as regards the application of increasingly refined CCDs to particle tracking (in particular as vertex detectors for identifying heavy flavor quarks and tau leptons), and also the advances in CCD detector design stimulated by these requirements. The lessons learned in this work should provide guidance for the construction of large arrays of CCDs or active pixel devices in the future in a number of areas of science and technology. ©1998 American Institute of Physics.