Before Microsoft was doing DOS their big product was Microsoft BASIC for the Altair computer. No OS, just load it into memory (from paper tape or cassette tape!) and start it up. Microsoft BASIC was written in 8080 assembler (Bill Gates once pointed this out to me in a meeting). The assembler that was used was called CROSS80 and it ran on both TOPS20 and TOPS10 (DEC10 operating systems for the DEC system that Bill and Paul used at Harvard when writing BASIC)
The TOPS-10 command line manual is here : https://livingcomputers.org/Discover/Online-Systems/User-Doc... and you will see that on page ix in the conventions used, TOPS 10 introduced command options (switches) with the forward slash character (/switch)
The use of / for "options" was a standard part of DCL (the DEC Command Language) here is the document for RT-11 (ftp://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/AA-PDU0A-TC_RT-11_Commands_Manual_Aug91.pdf)
Microsoft was copying DEC because at the time DEC was the most successful MINIcomputer company and Microsoft had aspirations of being the most successful MICROcomputer company.
As a result command options (or switches) were preceded by '/' and that gave the parser heartburn if you used forward slash for the path. If you read the RT-11 manual you will see that the COPY command took an option /BOOT to copy to the boot directory, and it was written COPY/BOOT not COPY<space>/BOOT. If a directory was involved it would be FOO/COPY/BOOT and how would you be able to parse that? Bell Labs (also DEC users at the time) switched to using '-' for UNIX to indicate a switch or option because it wasn't a path character.
At the end of the day the desire to be like DEC was what gave us both devices with colon's on the end (LPT: anyone?) and logging into the "active" directory. And DEC used slash for options in their DCL so that is what Microsoft used.