| The Control Strip made its first appearance on the first Apple PowerBooks with 68040's: the Blackbirds (officially known as the 500 series)
The strip was a little tab on the edge of the screen that, when clicked, expanded to a bar with handy functions on it. You could change your monitor resolution or color depth, change your sound input setting, dial into your ISP, or turn AppleTalk on or off. At first, this Strip would only appear on PowerBooks. Patches to get around this restriction were passed around AOL and the Internet, and a replacement known as Desktop Strip was written (and actually used by PowerBook owners who felt it was superior). With MacOS 7.6, the Control Strip was enabled for all Macintoshes,
It's rather easy to write one's own Control Strip extensions. Swatch released one to show the current Internet Time, and both SoundJam MP and MacAST can be controlled by Control Strip icons. | 
