So here's what I did.

I wired 2 AA batteries to one of the batteries and this allowed the computer to boot. Amazing.

So it boots, and everything is actually fine. The OS 7.1 comes up and I explore.

Now, I had flipped the large hard drive on it's back, so it was running upside down. Worked fine...

so 10 min later I power down, and the hard drive, as it spins down after the power was disconnected, makes this awful metal circular scraping sound. Yuck.

I reboot and it loads 7.1 fine.

but after several iterations of this, I boot again just because I'm playing around and the HD makes loud clicking noises upon boot.

After this, I get the ? icon.

My theory is perhaps either

1- the hard drive was just old (1988) and just died

2- turning HD upside down somehow broke it

I was all excited and then this HD problem.