ChatGPT launched on Windows 3.1

One of the developers has created a ChatGPT application for Windows 3.1 PCs. WinGPT is a very basic version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in an application that can run on an ancient 386 processor. It was created by the same mysterious developer who created Windle, a clone of Wordle for the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system.

“I didn’t want my 1993 Gateway 4DX2-66 to be left out of the AI ​​revolution, so I created the AI ​​Assistant for Windows 3.1 based on the OpenAI API,” writes a developer in a Hacker News thread.

WinGPT is written in C using Microsoft’s standard Windows API and connects to the OpenAI API server using TLS 1.3, so there is no need for a separate modern PC. This was a particularly interesting part of working on the application on Windows 3.1, along with managing the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit versions of Windows and creating the user interface for the application.

The Neowin site notes that ChatGPT responses are brief due to the extremely limited memory that cannot handle the context of conversations. The icon for WinGPT was also developed in Borland Image Editor, a clone of Microsoft Paint capable of creating ICO files.

“Memory is quite limited on Windows 3.1 machines, so I tried to reduce the amount of memory needed for WinGPT, especially in sending and receiving the query and response from the OpenAI API. The JSON responses of modern APIs aren’t especially optimized for size, and OpenAI’s API is no exception. I’ve asked the model to be brief in an effort to keep responses as small as possible. I’ve also chosen not to send the text of previous turns in the API calls, even though this means that the bot won’t be able to use prior conversation context”.

“I created most of the UI directly in C, meaning every UI component had to be created by hand in code,” says an anonymous WinGPT developer. “I was surprised that the set of standard controls available for use by any Windows 3.1 program is incredibly limited. You have some of the controls you’d expect – buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, edit boxes – but all the other controls you might need, including those used by the operating system itself, are not available.”

If you still have a Windows 3.1 machine that’s gathering dust in your attic, garage, or basement, you can download WinGPT binaries for 16- and 32-bit versions of Windows from dialup.net.