The Origins of ToonTalk

Where did the idea for ToonTalk come from?

There is rarely a simple answer to a question of where ideas came from. The design of ToonTalk was influenced by

Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey - these games from The Learning Company in the early 1980s had players doing a very limited sort of programming in an animated game world.
Zelda and other adventure games - many of the user interface ideas from ToonTalk came from studying games.
Concurrent Constraint Programming - the underlying computation model of ToonTalk comes from Janus, a concurrent constraint programming language. There is a large overlap with the idea of actor programming pioneered by Carl Hewitt in the 1970s.
Logo and Smalltalk - programming languages designed for children about 30 years ago.
Grasp - Jaron Lanier started to build an animated programming language in the early 1980s but became distracted by pioneering work in virtual reality.
Visual Programming & Program Animation - ToonTalk can be seen as taking the idea of using static pictures as source code and using animation as both source code and for depicting the execution of programs.
Pictorial Janus - A version of Janus which combined the ideas of visual programming and program animation.
Incredible Machine and Lemmings - These two games directly inspired the tutorial game in ToonTalk.

Special thanks to Markus Fromherz, David Kahn, and Mary Dalrymple for their help. And to the many beta testers who sent suggestions.