Putting ChatGPT on Windows 3.1, madness? And yet…

Who would have thought that good old Windows 3.1, retired for more than 30 years, could have run ChatGPT ? Thanks to the OpenAI API, developers got into the project, and it worked.

The world of tech often rhymes with challenge. Remember the whim of many developers who had fun running the first DOOM on unimaginable media: printer screen, iPod, connected fridge and even pregnancy test. Anything that could calculate became a potential candidate. Recently, a team set itself a goal: to practice a successful porting of the OpenAI chatbot on an obsolete OS to allow easier access to it.

ChatGPT and Windows 3.1, an unlikely duo

The name of the project? WinGPT. Its goal ? Get ChatGPT working on Windows 3.1. Since the OS dates from 1992, it took a couple of tricks to make this port possible. Written in C language, WinGPT is a third-party application that uses the standard Windows API. The developer team used the Open Watcom v2 compiler to translate the ChatGPT source code to this old OS. This tool makes it possible to compile for 16-bit Windows, even from Windows 11. It is this cross compatibility that made ChatGPT functional on Windows 3.1.

Thus, WinGPT can connect natively to the OpenAI API server through the direct use of TLS 1.3, an encryption standard dating from 2018. This avoids having to use a proxy on a more modern machine to establish the communication between the two devices. The limitations of Windows 3.1 have therefore been circumvented brilliantly!

WinGPT Challenges

Still, WinGPT’s design was a headache on many levels. The interface, first of all, had to be recreated element by element in the C language. Windows 3.1’s interface creation capabilities remained far too limited to proceed otherwise. Another problem was the status bar, an element that we have in front of us as soon as we turn on a computer. This did not exist natively under Windows 3.1, and the team recovered the work of a certain Philip J. Erdelsky. This developer had imagined the integration of a status bar in Windows 3.1 in 1997, which allowed developers to integrate it directly into WinGPT.

Another rather serious challenge awaited them: the memory limit of machines running Windows 3.1. To make this work properly, the team went through an intensive phase of work to reduce WinGPT’s memory consumption. The idea was to optimize the exchanges of requests and responses with the OpenAI API, to minimize their size and for the OS to hold up. Exchanges with the chatbot also could not take into account previous responses, and therefore the context.

It’s a bit like that, the magic of computing. Realize one fine morning that a technology that has fallen into oblivion is still capable of staying up to date with a little ingenuity and elbow grease. WinGPT is a feat of backwards compatibility, and its development still commands respect.

Sources: Neowin, DialUp