A ChatGPT client for… Windows 3.1

ChatGPT on Windows 3.1. Crédit dialup.net.

Retrocomputing hobbyists will get this. The anonymous developer behind Windle, the Wordle clone that runs on Windows 3.1, created an application to use ChatGPT on this operating system, launched over thirty years ago, mind you. “I didn’t want my Gateway 4DX2-66 from 1993 to be left out of the AI revolution, so I built an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1, based on the OpenAI API,” says the developer in a Hacker News thread.

The main challenge stemmed from the fact that there is no 16-bit library to manage the encrypted TLS 1.2 connections, an essential feature for communicating with OpenAI servers. Yeo Kheng Meng, publisher of a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS, pulled it off with a proxy that runs on a more modern system and provides on-the-fly decryption of HTTPS data. The WinGPT developer went down another path with the creation of a 16-bit port of the WolfSSL library that supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3 connections natively in Windows 3.1. Written in C, WinGPT is compatible with all 16- or 32-bit versions of Windows 3.1, but does not work natively on 64-bit versions. If you’re lucky enough to have a Windows 3.1 computer that still works, you can download WinGPT here. You can also use Wine if you’re on Linux or macOS.

⇨ Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham, “Person who made the Windows 3.1 port of Wordle is back with a ChatGPT client.”

2023-06-26