Hey HN, 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.
The most interesting parts of building this were:
- Getting TLS 1.2 and 1.3 working on Windows 3.1 so that WinGPT could directly connect to OpenAI's server without relying on a modern machine for TLS termination.
- Learning about the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit Windows, including the difference between far and near pointers.
- Building the UI in plain C code with the Windows API and limited selection of controls in Windows 3.1.
The most interesting parts of building this were:
- Getting TLS 1.2 and 1.3 working on Windows 3.1 so that WinGPT could directly connect to OpenAI's server without relying on a modern machine for TLS termination.
- Learning about the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit Windows, including the difference between far and near pointers.
- Building the UI in plain C code with the Windows API and limited selection of controls in Windows 3.1.
You can check it out here and learn more about what it was like to build it: https://www.dialup.net/wingpt/