I've searched my Squeak List archives (may not be quite 100% 
complete) back to 980919 for 'toon talk', 'toontalk', 'toon-talk' and 
'Kahn' with no hits before 001126.

Any other keywords to try?

There is a message which references a paper which may be of interest:
------------------------
>From: "Jim Benson" <jb at speed.net>
>Subject: Re: [GOODIE] Morph Dock Revisited version 0.1
>Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 17:39:07 -0700
><snip>
>This approach was suggested in Chang and Ungar's  "Animation:  From Cartoons
>to User Interface" http://www.sun.com/research/self/papers/animation.html
<snip>
------------------------
   Ken B.

At 11:58 AM -0800 on 11/27/00,  Ken Kahn is rumored to have written:
>Ali -
>
>You wrote:
>>
>>      I briefly checked out these links, and found the content very
>>  interesting. I also remember "ToonTalk" appearing on this mailing list a
>>  while back.
>>
>
>I searched all three archives mentioned on
>http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/775
>
>and I couldn't find anything more than a couple days old. The egroups
>archive seems only searchable for the last 6 months. And the
>http://squeak.cs.uiuc.edu/mail/squeak/ archive seems to only go back to
>August.  http://macos.tuwien.ac.at:9009/Server.home says it keeps messages
>400 days but I couldn't find anything more than 2 days old.
>
>Any idea when the discussion happened?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Best,
>
>-ken