The DOOM sources as originally released on December 23, 1997

linuxdoom-1.10/README.book

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+
+The DOOM Book
+
+Shortly after the Wolfenstein 3D source release,
+I sent a mail to Jay Wilbur suggesting a book
+about the DOOM engine. I anticipated a similar
+release of the DOOM sources within a year or
+two, and the obvious problems with the Wolfenstein
+sources (lack of accompanying artwork, a code 
+base not maintained for quite some time) seemed
+to demand a better approach. I talked to some
+publishing company reps at the Book Fair in 1995,
+and while they were cautiously interested, id was
+not.
+
+In the last weeks of 1996, following a visit at
+id Software two months earlier, and after the
+departure of Jay Wilbur, John Carmack asked me
+whether I was still interested in doing the book.
+I was, Bear sent me a code dump, and  Todd
+Hollenshead set out to address the legal concerns
+(of which were many).
+
+Unfortunately, what might have worked in 1995
+turned out to be a doomed attempt in 1997. I won't
+go into the details - let's just say that my
+leaving university and going back to full time
+writing for a living repeatedly forced me to
+change priorities on what looked more and more
+like a project unlikely to generate any revenue.
+
+By mid of the year, when the legal issues had
+finally been settled, it didn't look like I was
+going to find a publisher at all. Following the
+Book Fair in 1997 and some more discussions
+(with about a dozen publishers, total), I gritted
+my teeth and decided to abandon the project.
+
+Note that the book project as such wasn't supposed
+to hold up the source release to the public.
+However, given the legal concerns relating to
+the third party sound code in DOS DOOM, and the
+lack of Win32 support as well as the advantages of
+an OpenGL based release, the idea was to put
+together a consistent, stable code base prior to
+public release - most of which was supposed to be
+an offspring of my reformatting and modifying the
+code for the book.
+
+None of this worked out as intended. However, I
+hope that, at long last, this distribution
+will finally provide a good point to start for
+any cooperative effort to extend the already
+impressive lifespan of DOOM into the age of
+multiplayer servers and hardware-accelerated
+clients.
+