> ... with NT - whose end user usable versions always booted into graphical mode (outside of installer and emergency console)

Elaborating on this... the "Windows console" host (csrss.exe, analogous to a tty manager) is actually one of the few core Windows "subsystems" that actually runs as a Win32 usermode service instead of being baked into the NT kernel. Furthermore, up until Windows 8 (when the legacy XDDM[1] was removed), this system actually had the capability to draw a console in VGA text mode, bypassing the graphical session (and most of the rest of the kernel) entirely[2].

As you say, this is probably how most Windows non-graphical modes worked: bring up the VGA driver, skip starting the graphical subsystem, bring up csrss in VGA text mode. That all changed when Windows Vista deprecated XDDM in favor of DWM, which monopolizes access to the pipeline. From that point forward, such "non-graphical" releases (almost?) always bring up a graphical display session and window manager as part of the boot process. The only "non-graphical" thing about these is that they disable a few shell components and services, autostart a console window, and maybe stub out some of the win32 API.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... [2]: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1243573/Vga-Text-Mode-T...

“Windows the shell” is even longer dead than most people think. Windows 95 and beyond, despite not being based on NT, were fully 32-bit OSes and ran DOS in a VM (but tried very hard to make it seem like it was the other way around, for when apps relied on DOS functionality).

Even win 3.1 did that in a mandatory way with it dropping support for Real mode, and Standard and Enhanced were available for windows 2 already. And Windows applications of that era went through Windows API and Windows drivers, not DOS ones (although windows itself could fallback to DOS drivers in some cases)