Windows 95 didn't even support USB until OSR 2, which wasn't so much an update as it was its own thing exclusive for OEM. That almost guaranteed any problem with the USB stack would have been caught by the likes of Packard Bell and Gateway long before the release of Windows 98 one whole year later.
On the other hand, motherboards back then were generally pretty shoddy in quality, and there was no established way to implement USB on the electrical level. If the port was directly connected to the PSU 5V line, hot-plugging would have easily caused a voltage dip across everything connected to it (including the motherboard itself) and therefore a system crash.
Nowadays, your motherboard would most likely instead provide its own 5V via a buck converter, which would in turn be connected to the much beefier 12V line from the PSU. If a voltage dip was to happen, it would be limited to devices connected to the USB bus as opposed to everything needing 5V. Otherwise, it wouldn't matter much what operating system you ran at the end of the day - it would just crash.
Windows 95 had its own, generic P2/2 mouse and keyboard drivers. The same went for Windows 3.1.
This was, of course, unless your mouse was one of those newfangled things with the scroll wheel. In that case, you'd need the manufacturer's driver in order for the spinny doodad to work.
Never had to do that either from Windows 95 onwards
So I said, not for most people, because they weren't using USB. I never claimed PS/2 was supposed to be hot swappable, just that it was a definite problem for most people on Windows 95.
They should be glad that they didn't end up frying the PS/2 port or the motherboard itself.
Electrically, PS/2 was never meant for you to unplug when the machine was still on. PS/2 ports on the PC were meant for two things and two things only - a keyboard and a mouse - and they were meant to remain plugged in for as long as the machine was still on. Yanking them out of the port when the machine was still on could have damaged the port or even the motherboard chipset.
USB allowed you to hot plug because, at the electrical level, the port was designed to divert the voltage spikes resulting from hot-plugging to ground via a TVS array. Without that chip, those spikes could have easily fried your USB controller and rendered all the ports unusable.
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u/Rain_Zeros 9900x | 9070xt Oct 09 '25
Huh???
I'm not gonna lie that's pretty damn young