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The absence of serial ports, ADB ports, SCSI port, IRTalk, and floppy drive, and the addition of USB and FireWire ports, may affect the behavior and appearance of various system components. Modifications for such changes are in Mac OS 8.6 itself.
Some managers and drivers remain in the system to support existing applications that depend on those older devices. New applications are expected to use the new I/O channels such as USB and FireWire.
The iMac family computers have no ADB ports. The ADB Manager is still present, to retain compatibility with programs that require it. The system has an ADB shim layer to allow USB keyboards and mice to appear as legacy ADB devices.
Although there is no SCSI connector on the iMac family computers, the high-level SCSI interfaces will remain in the system. That allows for possible support for SCSI devices using a USB to SCSI or FireWire to SCSI adapter. Such an adapter would take the USB or FireWire commands coming from the port and convert them into SCSI commands to send to the drive. A SCSI driver would also need to be written that would take the SCSI commands coming from the system and embed them in USB or FireWire commands that would be sent to the device through the adapter.