Egleon, I did not mean to come off as flaming you, if thats the way it seemed. I apologize if you took it that way and indeed I could have softened my words much.

My advice to you is to pick up a beginner level book on programming. These can often be obtained for under $1 from library booksales. Also there are a plethora of online tutorials. Make sure it is a decent language, C and Java are good. You can look at open source codebases to get an idea where to start, an excellent one to see just the very basics in very well commented form is Kavir's Gladiator Pits.

Start by making small changes (but real changes-- not just making colours flashy) to a codebase you know well, move up to doing bigger changes. This all as practice. Then you will be ready to begin writing your own MUD from scratch. 2 years ago I didn't know the first thing about C but I started making small mods to the SMAUG codebase which gradually got bigger and now I can do massive original code projects at the drop of a hat. You, too, can do this with a little practice.

I recommend reading everything you can get your hands on about communication protocols. You will realize that everything on the internet-- ICQ, http, Counterstrike, FTP, e-mail, Everquest-- is all the exact same as a MUD, but with very fancy MUD clients. When you send a message on ICQ, you are really using the ICQ program as a MUDclient to send a "tell" command-- except instead of a simple "tell" its a rather convoluted binary code, but essentially the same thing. You can connect to the ICQ or AIM servers through a simple telnet window, and in theory if you knew the protocol well enough you could log on and chat with just that.