That ChatGPT Artificial intelligence has become a fad, which few doubt, at least when it comes to the mass market. The well-known chatbot has attracted such interest that enthusiasts with the necessary knowledge are taking it to the most unlikely places, including the old and defunct Windows 3.1.

On a dial-up web page[punto]com is published an application called WinGPT, an artificial intelligence wizard for Windows 3.1. According to its creator, the assistant can respond usefully to queries of all kinds, and therefore opens the door to do without Encarta and classic encyclopedias; gives useful life advice and can tell jokes; in addition to being a “digital companion” to help write documents and create spreadsheets.

The C programming language was used for its construction., that immortal that will stand the test of decades, and the standard Windows API. For code compilation, Open Watcom 2 is used, which enables cross-compilation for 16-bit Windows and Windows 11. Here, it is appropriate to recall the strong orientation towards backward compatibility, which has always characterized Microsoft’s operating system. The user interface was largely done directly in C, meaning that the developer had to write a high percentage of it by hand.

An interesting feature of WinGPT is that it is packaged with a modified version of WolfSSL that provides TLS 1.3 supportthe latest version of the cryptographic protocol that appeared in 2018. This eliminates the need to use a proxy machine with a newer operating system to establish communication.

Since WinGPT is oriented towards the old Windows 3.1, it naturally faces a number of limitations, especially with regard to the amount of memory that computers with said operating system have. For that reason, the developer tried to reduce the amount of memory needed by WinGPT, especially when it comes to sending a query and getting a response through the OpenAI API. To do this, he asked the AI ​​model to be concise in its responses and not send the text of previous conversations in API calls, which resulted in the bot not being able to use context from the previous conversation.

WinGPT is free software licensed under the GPLv2 license and it should work on any version of Windows that is compiled for 16-bit or 32-bit, but not those that are compiled for 64-bit, so downloading Wine was recommended as an alternative. Additionally, it requires a Winsock implementation and an OpenAI API key.