[userbinator]

My assumption is that LFSR literature was hard to come across in 1991/1992 and finding the correct tap for a 16 bit maximum length register was not worth the effort.

I guess it might be more due to the lack of overlap between the problem domains --- LFSRs were known since the late 60s in relation to CRCs and other error-correcting codes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code