I’ve always loved the look and feel of Windows XP. It was the first interface many of us ever used, and I thought it’d be fun to recreate that experience entirely in the browser using just a single HTML file.

The project includes a working calculator, a fake Internet Explorer that leads to bolt.new, a “Do Not Open” folder that triggers a Matrix-style animation, and an MSN Messenger clone where you can chat with an AI pretending to be someone named Ayça. That part was both fun and tricky — I had to find a way to integrate OpenAI’s API without exposing the key, which meant obfuscating it in the front-end.

Biggest challenges were managing DOM layering and window focus, making sure everything stayed in-bounds, and getting the nostalgic styling just right with zero external dependencies.

Overall, this was a fun mix of nostalgia, problem solving, and attention to detail.

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