It was created by Kenneth M. Kahn in 1995,[1] and implemented as part of the ToonTalk IDE,[2] a software package distributed worldwide between 1996 and 2009.
It runs on any modern web browser and differs from the desktop version of ToonTalk in a few ways.
Beyond its life as a commercial product, ToonTalk evolved via significant academic use in various research projects, notably at the London Knowledge Lab and the Institute of Education - projects Playground and WebLabs, which involved research partners from Cambridge (Addison Wesley Longman through their Logotron subsidiary), Portugal (Cnotinfor and the University of Lisbon), Sweden (Royal Institute of Technology), Slovakia (Comenius University), Bulgaria (Sofia University), Cyprus (University of Cyprus), and Italy (Institute for Educational Technology of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche).
It was also source of academic interest in Sweden, where Mikael Kindborg proposed a static representation of ToonTalk programs[7] and in Portugal, where Leonel Morgado studied its potential to enable computer programming by preliterate children.
[8] ToonTalk was influenced by the Janus computer programming language and the Actor model.
If we ignore certain constructs designed to facilitate I/O, we can see ToonTalk as not having any shared access to mutable memory.