Hacker News Reader

You might be confusing it with COM port mice on DB-9 connectors. I seem to remember those had to be set up and the machine rebooted.

View on HN

No, RS-232 (serial/COM/DE-9/DB-25) could be freely plugged and unplugged. PS/2 peripherals however always warned against hot-plugging [1]. The reboot you are remembering is because serial mice needed drivers installed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port#Hotplugging

Reply on news.ycombinator.com