system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
werent later ps2 boards and cables hotpluggable or am i mistaken there?
gpt
Some what.  They started to build in a safety so that the short out didn't happen, but you still had to restart the PC for the mouse/keyboard to be seen again a lot of the time.  Later some motherboards had built in PS2 to USB adapters so the PS2 ports were not "real PS2" and those had true hot pluggable features.  There may have been true PS2 hot pluggable though.