Stories about Xerox PARC aside, the Apple Lisa was released to the market at the end of January 1983, and I would be surprised if Microsoft wasn't big enough/rich enough at that point to acquire at least a couple of units from the very first batch to mess around with. Windows 1.0 RTM was November 1985.
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The world of computers was much smaller then. Everyone motivated enough knew what everyone else was doing.
Xenix supported the Lisa, and Excel was born on the Mac Classic.
Microsoft was big enough as they were already selling DOS and DOS software.