I would like as definitive a reference as possible for which version of Windows introduced the Windows ANSI Western character encoding.
My prime suspects are Windows 1.0 (common sense) and Windows 3.1.
Windows 3.1 was claimed by implication by a Microsoft book available on MSDN. It states that the encodings used by Windows 95 were introduced in Windows 3.1. I do not regard that as any definitive reference or even especially trustworthy, since it's overly vague and since it implies some falsehoods (e.g. codepage 437, the original IBM PC character set).
Update: In http://iana.org/assignments/character-sets I found the registered IANA names "ISO-8859-1-Windows-3.0-Latin-1" and "ISO-8859-1-Windows-3.1-Latin-1". The "windows-1252" was registered later (according to a discussion somewhere). It seems to me that they all refer to the same encoding, and in that case it appears that it was at least present in Windows 3.0. Thus (if true) invalidating the MS book statement which implied 3.1, but still open question exactly where