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But they did?

UCS-2 support was first released with some add on for Win3.1(which also still did most stuff with multiple character sets).

IIRC Win32s (the subset of win32 released for windows 3.1) only added UCS-2 string processing, none of the system wide character APIs.

I think all the actual OS was still codepage (with the "multibyte" versions for things like Eastern languages being pretty much forks), and windows95 wasn't really much different.

win32s brings codepage to/from widechar APIs and codepage table files (P_*.NLS), and a setting "AnsiCP=" in [NLS] section in win32s.ini.

16bit IE brings its own MSNLS.DLL for handling different codepages to ACP(Active Codepage) in Win3.1x.

and win9x also works mainly in ANSI codepage with some kernel side unicode support.

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