Last night, I opened up a non-techie friend's Windows PC to replace a dead fan. It had a Bluetooth KB. After I closed it back up, reconnected everything and powered it up, I was greeted by an ASUS BIOS message: "Press F2 for Setup or Enter to continue."

I pressed [Enter] ... nothing happened. [Enter]. Nothing. [Enter][Enter][Enter][Enter]. Nothing.

"Aurora, do you have a wired keyboard somewhere?"

"No, I gave it away."

KB batteries were good (she'd been using w/o problem before I arrived), and I'd not disturbed the BT dongle in one of the PC's USB ports.

very long wait. "Press F2 or ..." [F2]. BIOS SETUP (with GUI) appears. I clicked [Exit without saving changes]. VERY long wait, then the Windows blue-window logo appears. VERY long wait with the Windows spinning beads, then the Windows GUI appeared.

I've got a few fairly recently HPs (3 years old) that don't recognise the USB keyboard at BIOS. Luckily the PS2 port works.

Could be your keyboard doesn't have the USB boot keyboard profile enabled (or it simply doesn't do it) or a BIOS option to speed up boot by not enabling USB until afterwards is set or one of 1001 other options for designed to catch you out?

For wireless keyboards and mice that have a USB dongle, the dongle looks to the system like a USB hub with a USB keyboard and mouse attached. The system is completely unaware of the devices being wireless. Although the wireless protocol in these devices often use Bluetooth hardware, most do not use the Bluetooth software protocols (and thus can't be used with the built-in Bluetooth support that many systems now have). Proper Bluetooth devices are, of course, different.

But I sometimes use old systems (often HP ex. Windows terminals that I redeploy as low-power, always on Linux servers) that do not by default enable USB in the BIOS during startup. When you come across one of these systems set to default, it is impossible to use a USB keyboard to enter setup to change the default to enable the USB during startup.

Of course, changing this default setting allows you to use USB keyboards, but it's very much a chicken-and-egg situation. And you have to remember to not set the BIOS back to factory defaults!

As a result, I always keep a keyboard with a PS/2 connector around somewhere. The main one (that I will never get rid of unless it fails) is my IBM Model M.

Also, cue the historical "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue" message that always amused me!

Also, cue the historical "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue" message that always amused me!

Its amusing because most people who see it are deliberately trying to run without a keyboard, but it is assuming that you want a keyboard to keep going, so its waiting here so you can attach one and press F1 to confirm that a keyboard has been attached so it can continue. From that POV, the error message is entirely logical!

It's even more logical, as from memory if you booted without a keyboard into Windows for example, subsequently plugging a keyboard in once the system was up and running wouldn't be recognised and so there was no way to shut the machine down other than pulling the plug, and old systems didn't particularly cope well with that. The message was really saying "you've not plugged in a keyboard... sure you wanna do that?.."

If you wanted to run the machine headless, switching the error off in the BIOS was the way forward.

>"The main one (that I will never get rid of unless it fails) is my IBM Model M."

Almost impossible to consider a Model M failing!

One of the reasons to keep a PS/2 port around is for interrupted signalling, something USB can't do. USB needs to do polling, be it 200Hz, 500Hz... so they invented a way for USB to do interrupts too, via software, so no keyboard gets any perceived lag.

Another is keyboard rollover or NKRO: you can press as many keys at once you want, the system will get them all with ps2 signalling. USB keyboards had to add smarts to allow NKRO.

A third reason are BIOSes that don't support usb keyboards... but these are vintage now.

So, if you got a ps2 port and means to use it, slap the keyboard on it. Otherwise, any difference is merely academical.

Mice never had that problem, because they were already built after USB.

The first mouse I owned had a 9-pin serial connection, with a 9-25 way adaptor in case your PC still had the full-fat RS232 connector. That was the classic Logitech C7 3-button mouse from the mid-80s.

However before USB, before PS2, before RS232 for mice was standardised, mouse history also includes Bus Mice which needed their own ISA card to connect them into a PC.

Of course, various non-IBM PC computers, had their own proprietary mouse interfaces too.

The first mouse I owned (and still have...) had the raw quadrature outputs from the shaft encoders as it's interface. I had to build (from TTL parts) a circuit to generate a movement interrupt and a direction flag for each axis, and write a "driver" for it. In Z80 assembler.

Now where's my chisel...

"However before USB, before PS2, before RS232 for mice was standardised, mouse history also includes Bus Mice which needed their own ISA card to connect them into a PC."

Yup - I remember buying a mouse for a pre-Windows 3.x 286 PC I had on which the motherboard only had one 9-pin serial port (which I needed to connect to a modem) and one 25-pin parallel port for my printer. So, to add a mouse, I had to find a suitable one that came with it's own 8-bit ISA bus adaptor card. (The mouse was needed to help quickly navigate various menu options in both a DOS-based graphics program (rather than using keystroke combinations) as well as to use with various comms programs, such as ProComm+).

Nowadays, people are lucky as most PC motherboard have got multiple USB 2.0/3.0 connectors, network ports, 3.5mm audio sockets, TosLink optical outputs, lots of PCI slots, SATA and maybe eSATA sockets, and many graphics cards have multiple HDMI and Displayport sockets.

I can't parse your last sentence, but can say that mice probably never had that problem because the mouse/cursor freezing is considered normal behaviour on a computer and it's not expected to "catch up", whereas with keyboards people may well continue typing and trust that the words eventually appear.

Also, if you want to use suspend with wake-up-on-keypress, you have to make sure that a USB keyboard is plugged in to a port that has power even when the system is in standby.

> So, if you got a ps2 port and means to use it, slap the keyboard on it. Otherwise, any difference is merely academical.

Only do this if the machine is powered off.

PS/2 ports are notorious for not liking things plugged in (or removed) when they were powered on.

I've managed to ruin a few PS/2 ports by just swapping out a dead keyboard (users eating tangerines at their desk whilst typing ...) and too late remembering that the machine was not powered off yet. Giving a whole new meaning to the HOT in hot swapping.

Fortunately those machines also had USB ports.

The last time i encountered a PC that did not support USB in the BIOS must have been around the turn of the millenium (though I've kept a PS/2 keyboid/mouse around for another 2 decades orso).

Are you sure it wasn't the tangerines that killed the port? I've swapped many many PS/2 keyboards live and never had a problem beyond a few errant characters (following appropriate grounding protocols, naturally)

Admittedly not had to do it for a good 10 years now though.

There was a behaviour / electrical problem in the design, a capacitor at the wrong place without a tiny resistor to limit its maximum current draw and deliver. You could indeed fry PS2 ports that way. Later computers did not show that issue, but it took way too many years.

I had a 486 IBM PS/1 back in the day. On those machines it was very possible to kill a PS/2 port by plugging in something when the power was on. I knew this and was super careful (although I probably did do it a few times by mistake), but I was working in Dixons over the uni holidays and we did see a fair few come back with this issue. The engineers told me it was a tiny surface mount component that would blow. A capacitor if my memory serves me correctly (although it is 30+ years ago, so I could be wrong).

It was a long time since I used a PS/2 port, and I don't remember any failing, but it does strike me as poor engineering if you could break the electronics with an accidental tug of the cable. As I remember it the mini-DINs relied on friction to stay in, and didn't have a locking tab.

"t was a long time since I used a PS/2 port, and I don't remember any failing, but it does strike me as poor engineering if you could break the electronics with an accidental tug of the cable."

I don't think it was a problem if a PS/2 device was unplugged (accidentally or otherwise ;-) ). But woe betide you, if you plugged it back in, while the PC was still running...

When you mentioned tangerines, I was on a totally different track thinking TCS and the Microtan 65, predecessor to the Oric 1!

"PS/2 ports are notorious for not liking things plugged in (or removed) when they were powered on."

Yep, hence the "Keyboard missing, press F1 to continue" error.

I had loads of these green and purple adapters at work, the collection grew as more and more PCs came with enough USB ports to cope with two being needed for keyboards and mice permanently and the PS2 ports disappearing from motherboards. I still find the odd one of them at home and can instantly tell what it is and what it is for by colour and shape alone, we got some things right in this industry in those old days.

Kids today don't know they're born with their bluetooth this, M365 that... I had to get up early, wade through the SCSI mines, fend off zip drives and floppies just to get to a login screen

Using a 2.5 kg keyboard as a sword...

I'm not sure that even original IBM Model Ms were that heavy.

Of course the metal keyboards on an IBM 3279 mainframe terminal may have been.

They are, the F1-F24 version. Checked Wikipedia before hitting "Submit".

I stand corrected.

I've just put my 1990 1391406 model M on the bathroom scales, and with the coiled cable it's exactly 2.15 kg (although the cable contributes quite a lot to the overall weight).

In my defence, the ones I've been dealing with more recently have been Unicomp model Ms, and the backplate as well as the plastics are much lighter.

The 3279 keyboards were something else, however.

For my sins, I was once (when I was young) an IBM field engineer in Londinium. I spent my life repairing 3278/3279 keyboards. Weight wasn't the issue. It was all the crud and detritus that got inside, preventing keys from working. A special hatred for those that smoked a lot and ate their lunch at their desk.......

Well, my Northgate Omnikey Ultra weighs about 2.15 kg, so something older from IBM may easily be heavier.

"Using a 2.5 kg keyboard as a sword..."

My first PC came with a heavy Cherry Extended (PC-AT) keyboard and it had a huge thick metal plate on the underside...and that keyboard worked for many years, even though the PC was upgraded and then replaced at least two other times. The keyboard used a large round DIN style connector that was plugged into a matching DIN socket, not one of those small pansy purple PS/2 types...

"wade through the SCSI mines"

Is that mines like coal or iron, or like landmines? (Could go either way...)

Either way you're terminated...

"Kids today don't know they're born with their bluetooth this, M365 that."

Just show some of the kids the 3 different connectors on 1980's hard drives: MFM, RLL and SCSI...and then show them some PC motherboards that don't have the right on-board connectors for these drives and then give them a box of mixed ribbon cables, 4 pin Molex adaptors and various HDD adaptor cards and get them to connect the drives correctly and then get them to install DOS (from a 5 1/4" floppy) onto a working drive and to then boot the computer. !!!!

And they'll probably have it done faster than I can find an f'in setting in the Sharepoint admin centre.

SCSI - a menace to goats and barnfowl...

Trying to tell KVM/QEmu to capture the mouse/keyboard device and pass it between host & guest requires[1] putting the USB-enumeration-generated device id into the XML config. So moving ports, or (far) worse having a glitch during a session and you've just lost the connection (and has it gone to the host, the guest - or is just flapping in the wind?)

[1] in the docs & examples I've found so far; pointers to better ways to do things gratefully accepted.

Typing this on a Model M from 1986 - plugged into an AT to PS/2 adapter plugged in to a PS/2 to USB adapter. Works great!

I keep checking eBay for vintage keyboards. My best find so far is a PS/2 keyboard that's built like a battleship and great to type on, but it's not an IBM, sadly.

It warmed the cockels of my heart to see DE-9 as opposed to the incorrect DB-9.