OS/2 1.0 and the first edition of the CUA were both released in December 1987 according to Wikipedia; Raymond's story isn't dated but could've happened before this. (If I had to make a wild guess, I could imagine this request was a side effect of some internal IBM battle about what the CUA should dictate).

I imagine this is mostly about form-based applications, GUI or not, before the Microsoft pulled the rug from under IBM.