I can’t believe I’m saying this, but if you can find a cheap MacBook m1 (I have one for work and I hate it) might be OK for this. Get a stick on key cover for it. The only thing that is great about it is battery life, like 2 days with moderate/heavy use. Set up an remote client to connect to your machine and use it that way. Screen is great, only openings on it are usb-c ports and the keyboard.

Concentrated evil. There should be a lot of stuff. Some way to bridge now and then.

Couple of things - back then, bios was slow to load. Add to that if they had a usb keyboard or mouse, the bios wouldn’t detect it and make you go into bios (even though the keyboard and mouse it just didn’t detect accepted the keypresses to go into bios). There was an option to set in most to skip keyboard and mouse errors. They probably didn’t know how to set it.