Actually, a friend of my brother's was talking about it back
when I went home to visit (I live on the East Coast, family is
back in the Midwest). It sounded pretty interesting to me- I'm
a big fantasy fiction fan, but never played dungeons and
dragons or anything like that. So I checked it out and got
hooked. He also gave me some advice about figuring out how to
do things, which was invaluable. 

So yeah, I hadn't really had much experience with MUDs before
he told me about them... although I did have an ex get me
hooked on the old info-com games. So I'm a sucker for
interactive fiction, and CF takes it to a whole new level.