UPDATE: just uploaded to IF Archive.
Filename: INFORM2.arcfs
275595 bytes.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Thank you!
Could you also upload a version repackaged in a .zip file? Most people don’t have arcfs software lying around. (Although I see some available options linked at http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/ArcFS .)
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Tomorrow I’ll do a tarball and/or .zip (as historian, I strive to preserve the original, as-found, state…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Of course!
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Just uploaded the tarball 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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@Piergiorgio_d_errico, aren’t you going to tell the story about how you found this? Is there any hope of other early versions being found from the same source(s)?
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YAY!!! Seconding @otistdog, please tell the story! I’m hoping there are more treasures where you found this source code.
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The announcement post for Inform 2 can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/msg/d05125b9d5744c0b
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Yes. Not a much exciting history, anyway.
Simply, I doggedly continued hunting inside the many acorn PD/shareware floppy/CD images around the 'net (esp. ifarchive.org) and surprisingly I found Inform 2 in a… 1996 vintage CD ! dunno how an early version ended there, but I suspect that the generalised lack of version number in the archive filenames in those Acorn Archimedes PD disks/discs is what is to be thanked.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I for one would have been very excited to make such a discovery. Lately I’ve been trying to find complete source code for Frotz earlier than 2.32. 2.22 has shown up in a source package for Windows CE. It doesn’t seem much different from 2.32.
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I guess that might be a good way to find unarchived versions of games, as well. E.g. archive.org has AMINET CD Number 18, which contains Frotz222r7.lha (no source code included, unfortunately), which contains Release 5 / Serial number 961209 of Graham Nelson’s port of Adventure.
At a quick glance, I didn’t see that version in the IF Archive, though I could easily be wrong.
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Reading through this thread, I have a question that feels like it should have an obvious answer. With that said, I’m not sure what it would be, so, I’m going to ask anyway.
Has anyone contacted Graham Nelson about this? It seems plausible he might have some older versions hanging out.
I believe he’s said the earliest versions have been lost, along with the source code to Curses and Jigsaw and other pieces of historical memorabilia from that time. (Though I could be entirely wrong on this.)
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He definitely said the source to Curses was lost, but Allen Garvin re-created I6 source for Curses starting with a reverse-compilation.
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I’ve talked about this kind of thing before (older TADS releases), but the fact we actually have Interactive fiction lost media is very interesting IMHO. If only we knew how important this kind of thing would be 30 years in the future, maybe we’d preserve everything when possible. Who knows; no one has a time machine (unless Zarf does, he’d probably be the one to build it.)
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On the other hand, it’s impressive how much we do have from the early days of interactive fiction! I never would have expected how many of the early microcomputer games have survived from the 70s and 80s. And then the creation of the IF Archive saved so many more.
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