I got in contact with an iomega engineer and I have bought all the mockups and demo hardware from him, should arrive in a few days.
I know this can be a touchy subject, but is there any chance you can tell the story of how you went about finding this guy as well? I'm curious how one goes from knowing that something might possibly exist to finding who might possibly have it to asking to buy it.
Everyone is connected to you in some way or another. People who know people who know people who know you, that's basically how it happens. I'm excited to learn about the zip drive by the way!
Money. E-mail people with resumes online from that company / era. I keep looking for hardware with subtle differences. Like if you look at all the xbox 360 controllers on ebay that are wired and white, then grid the images and look for texture differences. You can find a lot of protos that way because the plastics are different, or the markings are different.
This sounds interesting. Are there any records of Nintendo devs using zip disks to test early builds of their games, or was the technology ultimately rejected before they could get their hands on it? If the latter is true, then it's too bad that the hardware is essentially a paperweight, but who knows, maybe someone will come forward one day and confirm that it did indeed see the light of day.
If this is what you're talking about... it was probably just a mockup that was based on hardware specs Nintendo gave to the press. Of course, it could also have been a prototype design that was revised when Nintendo decided to use their own disk format. Since there are no other photos of this unit on the internet, it's kind of hard to tell.
Pretty stoked about this! Anything concerning prototypes from this era of Nintendo always gets me excited.