Ttdfjt

I want to use my old PS/2 mouse & keyboard with my Dell Latitude, which has no PS/2 ports.

I am fully aware that the easiest way to do this would to use an active PS/2 to USB converter, like this nice one from Amazon, learning this from reading it here on Tom's hardware forums, here on the lenovo forums, here on alt windows 10 forums, and even here on wikipedia.

However, a salesman at an anonymous-remaining electronics company sold me a pair of passive PS/2 to USB adapters, like this not-so nice one from Amazon, which simply changes the pin positions from PS/2 to to USB, but not the data or protocol - which windows 10 doesn't know natively how to make sense of.
Sidenote: I don't actually know if that amazon one is a converter or adapter, but it looks similar to what I got.

Through both stubbornness not to spend any money, and the fact that it will be a cool project and way to learn how this stuff works, I want to find a way, using software, to interface my laptop and the PS/2 keyboard/mouse using the adapters I bought

Is there a existing way to help windows interpret the signals the adapted keyboard/ mouse are sending it?
or,

if not, which skills do I need to find a solution, and what is the quickest & easiest way to learn them?

I have a reasonable understanding of windows, computers, and basic hardware, however my knowledge of drivers, firmware, and what makes windows work is limited.

EDIT: Not quite sure if this question belongs on this site. Let me know.

I want to find a way, using software, to interface my laptop and the PS/2 keyboard/mouse using the adapters I bought.

Assuming you want to use the passive PS2-to-USB adapter you just bought to plug it into a USB port on your Windows 10 PC, then this will not work.

The passive PS2-to-USB adapters require the keyboard or mouse to be multi-protocol: The keyboard or mouse must natively speak the USB protocol in addition to the PS2 protocol.

If they do, it will work out of the box. If they don't, then you have the USB host controller in your PC speaking to the PS2 controller in your keyboard and mouse. But you can't reprogram the USB host controller to speak anything else besides the USB protocol, even if you are a crack firmware developer. Because there's no way to reprogram the USB host controller. In the same way, you can't change the PS2 controller in your keyboard or mouse to speak the USB protocol.

So, game over.

If you want a fun project, you will need a piece of hardware that is flexible enough to allow software to control it to such a degree that it can understand the PS2 protocol. So essentially you'll be writing software for an active PS2-to-USB adapter on a RaspPi, a microcontroller, or something similar.

But as you stated in your question, that's not what you want.

It's possible that the mouse and keyboard implement both PS/2 and USB; on these devices, the passive connectors work. However, if this is not the case, you won't be able to use the PS/2 device over USB, since the device will not be sending coherent data to the USB controller.

It is theoretically possible, however, for you to wire the data and clock lines of the PS/2 device to input lines in your PC's parallel port interface (if it has one), and then write a Windows kernel driver to interpret the data. However, if you're going as far as to implement an active converter in software on your machine, it's probably easier to buy a pre-built USB-to-PS/2 active converter.