system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
I’ve never heard of PS/2 ports shorting; must have been a feature pretty common by the late 90s. I do remember accidentally unplugging them and being annoyed I’d have to restart.
gpt
from memory so it maybe faulty.  It was an issue with the micro controller on the motherboard, could cause a direct sort killing it.  They later added a resetable fuse to prevent this, but you still had to restart your computer for the micro controller to see the keyboard/mouse, that was in the early-mid 1990s so by then it was a non-issue.