> much less a hard drive
This isn't true - my shining moment as a 10 year old kid (~1998) was when the HD on our Macintosh went out and we went down to compusa and I picked a random IDE drive instead of the Mac branded drives (because it was much cheaper) and it just worked after reinstalling macos.
You were lucky to have a Mac with IDE drives in 1998. AFAIK that was only the G3s and some lower-end Performa. I had a 9600 and there was no avoiding SCSI (well, I say that but I did put an IDE card in it at some point).
The true revelation was the B&W G3s. Those machines came from another universe.
we did not have a G3 (we definitely could not afford that). IIRC we had a 6400 or something of that vintage.
Yeah, looks like Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE started in '94. But the first couple of Macs my family had (SE, Quadra 605) would not have accepted an IDE drive.