I love those 80 pixels x 15 pixels buttons, they are neat and cool.
I don’t know who first got this original idea, but many button-users do point to Antipixel (by Jeremy Hedley who’s living in Tokyo). I don’t find many buttons there.
Kalsey Consulting Group provides a free-of-charge, online button maker by which you can control the colours of the background, text and borders. Almost all of my bottons are produced by this online maker.
UPDATE (2003.09.04 8:22PM): I’ve just read this and learnt more about the history of these buttons.