A couple of the guys at my office were talking about playing Doom when we were young, which quickly lead to me googling how to play DM on a modern machine. Since I wanted to play something resembling the original game and something cross-platform that would run on my Linux workstation, I got four players to fire up Chocolate Doom for a couple days. It soon became apparent that we needed C/S features since players needed to be able to come and go as their real work dictated.
Somehow, some additional searching turned up Odamex 0.5.0 and I set up a private LAN server and we were hooked. Odamex 0.5.0 played great on a LAN and we didn't need (nor did we know about) features like unlagged, interpolation, moving sector prediction, etc.
After making a few maps of my own, I opened our LAN server to public where HeX9109 and Ralphis were able to get 20 players in the server. Based on the response I saw, I knew I wanted to help out the Odamex project and contacted HeX9109, who referred me to #odamex-dev. And that was that...