Windows always ran in graphical mode AFAICT[1], it’s just that the system font was monospace (Fixedsys), as every 3.x porting guide and even Petzold ≤ 5th ed. m

Windows always ran in graphical mode AFAICT[1], it’s just that the system font was monospace (Fixedsys), as every 3.x porting guide and even Petzold ≤ 5th ed. mentions. Apparently IBM’s TopView (released in 1985, same as Windows 1.0) was a text-mode windowing environment with preemptive(!) multitasking, but I can’t find much about it (seems that it was designed to run existing DOS applications, thus didn’t do virtual memory and ended up too memory-hungry for the time?). [1] See, e.g., http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html