“ The inline images such as the world/book icon and the CERN icon, would have been displayed in separate windows, as it didn't at first do inline images.” https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser
“ Marc [Andreessen] and Eric [Bina] did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows.” https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser
In the last quote Tim Berners Lee is talking about the Mosaic browser Marc and Eric built at NCSA. It is arguably the thing that made Marc Andreessen famous. And It is indisputably the start of the graphical web. I mean, Marc literally and controversially invented the IMG tag for this.
Mosaic came out in 1993, two years after the first WWW (the browser being discussed). So in the earliest years of the web people were absolutely using text mode browsers.
(And if displaying graphics optionally in their own window counts as being graphical to you, email and ftp were already there.)